Were the Wright Brothers Really First in Flight?
THE WRIGHT BROTHERS’ biplane hanging in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum has not fallen to the floor, but the institution may have been wobbled by news from Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft. The most authoritative publication on aircraft and flight history now believes a German émigré to the United States was the first to fly—piloting a controllable, high-wing monoplane in Bridgeport, Conn., on August 14, 1901, beating the men of Dayton by more than two years.
Claims that Gustave Whitehead flew first have been around for decades. The editor of the Bridgeport Herald witnessed Whitehead’s flight and published a story about it, and there was supposedly a blurry photo of Whitehead’s No. 21 model plane (the Condor) in the air. Some historians said the photo disappeared, others that it never existed, and the German was dismissed by many as a fraud.
Now, however, part-time historian John Brown, an Australian who works for a Bavarian aircraft construction firm, has uncovered new evidence that a panoramic photo of a 1906 aeronautics exhibit in Germany may show the mysterious photo of Whitehead in flight. Experts enlarged and examined the 1906 image, and Jane’s, along with Brown and others, concluded that it is the long-sought photo of the flying Condor.
In his Jane’s editorial, Paul Jackson lists several reasons why Whitehead’s feat has long been overshadowed—one being that the Wrights’ design profoundly influenced the course of aviation— but concludes, “The evidence cannot be shaken off anymore, thanks to John Brown’s researching. The Wrights were right; but Whitehead was ahead.”
The Smithsonian is not convinced. In a blog post on the National Air and Space Museum website (airandspace.si.edu), senior aeronautics curator Tom Crouch dismissed Brown’s discovery as a “supposed photograph” of Whitehead in flight. And he labels news coverage as “questionable.” He notes that while the Wright brothers kept detailed records, Whitehead’s feat lacks documentation—and he failed to follow up his flight.
One point might raise questions about the Smithsonian’s position: When the institution acquired the Wrights’ airplane in 1948 (for $1), it agreed to Orville Wright’s stipulation that it never credit anyone else with flying a manned, powered aircraft before the Wright brothers.
National History Day Lets Students Shine
IT’S NOT OFTEN that 2,800 students gather in one spot to talk history. But that’s what happens every June at the University of Maryland, where the finalists in the annual National History Day competition make their last (and best) presentations to the judges. What began as a little event at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1974 has turned into an international extracurricular extravaganza. Some 600,000 high school students from the United States and abroad produced original papers, websites, documentaries, exhibits and performances around this year’s topic, Turning Points in History: People, Ideas and Events.
Students compete at the local and then state level before winners move on to the final in sundry categories. NHD Executive Director Cathy Gorn says this history throw-down is not just a competition. “This is not a secondary-school version of Jeopardy, memorizing names and dates,” she says. “It’s about students doing critical thinking and original research and coming up with coherent and lively presentations. Students must learn to think analytically about material, to draw conclusions, to write and present information in creative ways.” And, she adds, teachers are seeing the benefits. “National History Day is a way to fill the gap that we see in school curriculums, where history is taking a back seat to STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] classes. That education is vital to our future…but so is history.”
—Richard Ernsberger Jr.
After 143 Years, Friends Again
THE GUN that started a feud in 1870 between the Barber and Mizell families in Orange County, Fla., has helped to end it. The double-barrel shotgun that killed county sheriff David Mizell, spurring the murders of several Barbers, was donated to the Orange County Regional History Center, with members of both clans present.
Cather’s Life, Unveiled
WILLA CATHER’S very private life is going to become more public. Cather is acclaimed for her novels, including O Pioneers! and My Antonia, but the writer insisted that no one publish her letters or adapt her stories for movies after her death. (She died in 1947.) That request was respected until the 2011 death of her nephew Charles Cather, after which Cather’s copyrights passed to the Willa Cather Trust and a foundation, and the bans on film rights and correspondence publication were lifted. In April, Alfred A. Knopf published The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, which collects 566 of her roughly 3,000 surviving letters. The book’s editors, Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout, told the New York Times that the “lively, illuminating letters” will reveal Cather as “a complicated, funny, brilliant, flinty, sensitive, sometimes confounding human being.”
Whaler “Looks Strong Again”
AFTER FIVE YEARS of work costing $7 million, the Mystic Seaport maritime museum in Connecticut has restored America’s last wooden whaling ship. But it was no easy task. The 113-foot long Charles W. Morgan, built in 1841, needed a lot of work—and a lot of wood. And finding authentic, protected live oak and longleaf pine took some creativity. Mystic Seaport salvaged trees damaged in the hurricanes Katrina, Ivan and Ike, and pulled timbers from the bottom of Boston Harbor. It also obtained wrought iron from old tiger cages at the Memphis Zoo. Mystic shipyard craftsmen detailed the Morgan’s components as they took the ship apart, and then they rebuilt it using 19th-century woodworking techniques. Shipyard director Quentin Snediker described the restored whaler, a National Historic Landmark, as being “like a collective sculpture, with all these craftsmen coming together to create one form.” He added: “It’s very rewarding work to see the ship look strong again.”
Hopi Sacred Artifacts Sold
AMERICA’S roughly 20,000 Hopi people, who live mostly in northeastern Arizona, are outraged by the auction of sacred katsinam headdresses and masks in Paris. Larger than related katsina dolls that Hopi sell to outsiders, katsinam are considered sacred objects that embody spiritual messengers and augur steady rain, bountiful harvests and the fertility of women. The Hopi tried to recover 70 katsinam obtained by the French auction house Néret-Minet Tessier & Sarrou, but the sale went ahead on April 12 despite protests inside and outside the auction hall. Sixty-five katsinam were sold for a total of $1.2 million. One of them, called Crow Mother, sold for $209,000. “Heartbreaking” was how Bo Lomahquahu, a Hopi exchange student and protester, described the auction. “The [masks] are truly sacred to us,” he told the website Indian Country Today. “To see people walking out with them in bags, like some object…I felt really helpless.”
State Asylum Turned Museum
THE OSCAR-WINNING 1975 movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was filmed at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem. Most of the 130- year-old psychiatric facility was torn down recently, but part of it was preserved as the Oregon Museum of Mental Health. The exhibition area contains the wall-mounted TV that figured in a key scene in the movie along with old records, restraints and an electroshock machine. Alice Patton, president of the museum’s board of directors, says, “We try to tell the story [of psychiatric treatment] in a balanced way, and always emphasize that people did the best they could at the time.”
Comic Books, Kids and Controversy
VIOLENT VIDEO GAMES have been cited for fostering uncivilized behavior, but in the 1940s and 1950s some experts believed lurid comic books were a problem. Chief among the critics was psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who claimed in his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent that certain comic books turned young readers into delinquents. The charges sparked a U.S. Senate hearing and an anti-comic book movement—and comic book publishers capitulated, creating the Comics Code Authority to censor their products. Now a study of Wertham’s newly accessible papers, written by University of Illinois professor Carol Tilley and published in Information and Culture: A Journal of History, casts doubt on many of Wertham’s assertions. Tilley found that Wertham manipulated, distorted and fabricated evidence, including findings attributed to clinical studies with young people. “Wertham’s deception angers me,” says Tilley. “I couldn’t say in a scholarly journal that it [infuriates] me, but it does.”
Originally published in the August 2013 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.
