History at Stake : Will It Fly? Test Set for Wright Rival

At a glance, it has the look of something dreamed up by Rube Goldberg. What appears to be a small rowboat is mounted on wheels and outfitted with big, arching batwings and a tail that looks as if it were copied from a mockingbird.

It is, in fact, a painstaking reproduction of a flying machine built 85 years ago by a German immigrant named Gustave Whitehead, who lies buried in Lakeview Cemetery at nearby Bridgeport and whose name can be found among the footnotes of early aviation history.

For more than 50 years, an argument has persisted that Whitehead made a powered flight of half a mile or more in August, 1901, 2 1/2 years before the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C. But so far, the evidence gleaned from musty newspaper files and attics and the fading memories of people who knew Whitehead has not been enough to sell his case to the historical Establishment.

‘Made Some Hops’

“The people at the Smithsonian Institution claim that he only made some hops,” said William O’Dwyer, a 65-year-old former Air Force pilot who has spent about $60,000 and nearly 20 years trying to get what he considers a fair hearing for Whitehead. “Well, when in hell was half a mile a hop? Gus Whitehead was a very significant figure in the invention of the airplane, and they try to dismiss him as a night watchman and a truck driver.”

In the next several weeks, O’Dwyer and his band of believers, who have recreated Whitehead’s flying rig of bamboo poles, piano wire, silk and sailcloth, will attempt a powered test flight of their own in a further effort to rescue him from anonymity.

They may test the machine more than two dozen times in preparation for the climactic moment when they will attempt to duplicate in every known particular Whitehead’s supposed 1901 flight with the machine he prosaically called “No. 21.”

Longstanding Squabble

But no matter how the flight turns out, it will not settle the long-running squabble--which is rapidly becoming the most publicized of the many claims of a powered flight before the 12-second voyage of Orville and Wilbur Wright.

Already the Whitehead case, doggedly argued by O’Dwyer since 1963, has embarrassed the prestigious Smithsonian Institution and resurrected memories of the Smithsonian’s uncertainty in proclaiming the Wright brothers the first to make a controlled powered flight.

Ten years ago, with help from Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. (R-Conn.), O’Dwyer got a copy of a previously secret 1948 contract between the Smithsonian and the estate of Orville Wright. It revealed a surprising condition in the institution’s acquisition of the famous Wright “Flyer,” now hanging in the center hall of the National Air and Space Museum.

The agreement called on the Smithsonian not to display any flying machine or model “of earlier date than the Wright Aeroplane of 1903, claiming in effect that such aircraft was capable of carrying a man under its own power in controlled flight.”

Since then, O’Dwyer and other staunch Whitehead supporters have contended that the Smithsonian will not seriously consider Whitehead’s accomplishments because to do otherwise would deprive the Smithsonian’s museum of one of its most prized artifacts.

Smithsonian officials scoff at the suggestion.

“If it should be demonstrated that Gustave Whitehead or anybody else flew before the Wright brothers, we would in no way disregard the information simply to save the artifact,” said Smithsonian historian Peter Jakab. “We would not disregard the truth to keep that artifact or any other.”

Another Craft

The agreement that the Smithsonian would represent no plane to be older than the Wright Flyer was put into the contract, Jakab said, to formally settle a longstanding controversy between the venerable museum and the Wright family.

At the time that the Wright brothers were preparing for their flight in 1903, Samuel P. Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian, was working on his own flying machine. It crashed in October of 1903 and crashed again just nine days before the Wright flight, tumbling ignominiously into the Potomac River.

Eleven years later, after Langley was dead, a replica of his plane was built and successfully flown, whereupon the Smithsonian put it on display and called it the first machine capable of flight.

Not until 1942, after the Wright brothers had become widely recognized around the world for making the first true powered flight, did the institution acknowledge that the Langley replica represented a significant modification of the original and admit that the Wright brothers had, in fact, been the first to accomplish true controlled, powered flight.

Contract Signed

Six years after that, the contract was signed with Orville Wright’s estate, and the Flyer, which had been on display for 20 years at the Science Museum in London, was delivered to the Smithsonian.

Now the challenger to the Wright brothers’ throne is Gustave Whitehead, who arrived in the United States in 1894 as Gustave Weisskopf. Settling in Connecticut after living in several northeastern cities, he worked at a variety of jobs--auto mechanic, coal miner, night watchman, truck driver and kite maker--and designed gliders and small motors.

He died in 1927, apparently after suffering a heart attack while lifting the engine out of a Model T Ford, and was buried in Bridgeport. A bronze spike marked by the number “42” was the only marker on his grave.

Although Scientific American, the Bridgeport Herald, the New York Tribune and the Boston Transcript had carried reports of a 1901 flight, the debate over whether he flew before the Wrights did not start until several years after his death. It was launched not by anyone who had worked with him or had seen him fly, but by Stella Randolph, a secretary in a doctor’s office in Washington who eased the burden of the Depression by doing free-lance writing.

1937 Book

After an old newspaper clipping caught her attention, she came to Connecticut and interviewed members of Whitehead’s family, his neighbors and men who had worked in his shop. Collecting pictures and hardware left from his flying machines, she amassed enough material to write a book, “The Lost Flights of Gustave Whitehead,” which she published in 1937.

The book created some professional interest but, like Gus, got little public attention. And there the story more or less rested until 1963, when O’Dwyer was rummaging through an attic and found photographs of Whitehead and one of his flying machines.

The trail quickly led to Randolph, who is now in her 90s and living in a North Carolina nursing home--a Whitehead guerrilla in Wright territory, as O’Dwyer describes her.

Together, the self-taught historians fought Whitehead’s fight until Randolph was sidelined by the infirmities of age. They wrote another book, “History by Contract,” updating Randolph’s earlier work, and denounced the Smithsonian contract with Orville Wright’s estate.

Scale Models Flown

O’Dwyer kept hunting for any scrap of information on Whitehead’s work. He went to Whitehead’s hometown of Leutershausen so often that he made Gus and himself local heroes and stimulated aircraft modelers to build and fly scale models of No. 21. At home, he succeeded in getting Connecticut to declare Whitehead the “Father of Connecticut Aviation” and in having the numbered marker on his grave replaced with a proper monument.

The filing cabinets in O’Dwyer’s den are now stuffed with Whitehead lore. His files, he said, include interviews and sworn affidavits from about 20 people professing firsthand knowledge of Whitehead flights.

Among them is a statement from Anton Pruckner, a neighbor, who said that Whitehead, on his Aug. 14, 1901, flight, reached an altitude of about 50 feet, traveled for half a mile and landed unscathed. Moreover, Pruckner declared that the Wright brothers themselves had visited Whitehead’s shop sometime before 1903.

Account of Flight

“I was present and saw them myself,” he told O’Dwyer. “I know this to be true because they introduced themselves to me at the time.”

An account published in the Bridgeport Herald on Aug. 18, 1901, said the flight took place in a large field near Fairfield. Describing the machine as looking “like a great white goose rising from the feeding ground in the early morning dawn,” it said Whitehead had skillfully avoided a clump of trees before cutting his engine and gliding to a landing.

Although the Smithsonian itself takes no official position on the long list of achievements claimed for Whitehead, including the inventor’s own assertion that he flew a seven-mile closed loop in 1902, historians associated with the museum deny that the aviation history community has overlooked Whitehead.

Jakab, the institution’s resident expert on early flight, contends that the newspaper references to Whitehead’s flights are open to question and conflicting interpretation. The interviews Randolph and O’Dwyer have published, he said, are “often confusing and conflicting.”

‘An Experimenter’

“My view of Whitehead is that he certainly did build airplanes and he certainly did build engines,” Jakab said. “I would characterize him as a comparatively minor figure. I would not say he was a crank, either. He was an experimenter. But there were a lot of them.”

Tom D. Crouch, former curator of astronautics at the Air and Space Museum, has a harsher view. An expert on the Wright brothers, Crouch flatly dismissed Whitehead in “A Dream of Wings,” his history of early flight.

“Gustave Whitehead was not a neglected aeronautical genius who flew before the Wrights,” Crouch declared. “Nor did his work prove to be of value to other experimenters. Rather, the story is one of press-agentry and wishful thinking triumphant.”

But the tenacious O’Dwyer insists that Crouch’s “A Dream of Wings” inadvertently confirmed a cover-up of Whitehead’s flight. He maintains that a photograph published in the book shows a picture of the German’s machine in flight.

Crouch’s book includes a photograph of the exhibit hall of the 1906 New York air show. O’Dwyer maintains that one of the pictures shown hanging on the wall is of Whitehead in flight, and he says the pictures were turned over to the Smithsonian after the exhibit.

But blowups and computer enhancements of the small picture in the background of the photograph produce only a blur. And Smithsonian officials say the institution’s files contain no picture of Whitehead in flight.

Moreover, Jakab says a successful flight testing of the reproduction of No. 21 cannot change his view. “It is an interesting exercise,” he said, “and I commend them for it, but it is a separate issue from history.”

The reproduction, which was built with a $10,000 contribution from Fairfield businessman William Kaye, passed its first major test on July 10, when it was tethered to a flatbed trailer so that it could rise a few inches off the surface as it was towed down an airport runway at 40 m.p.h. With Andy Kosch, a Stanford University biology teacher, aboard, it took wing for 300 yards.

Silk Wings

Now the nylon wings are being replaced with silk--contributed by the Japanese silk industry--and wooden propellers are being completed for the first attempt at a powered flight.

The contraption is in the hands of such experts as Mike Cartabiano, an aerospace engineer who worked for Lockheed Corp., the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Navy and Sikorsky Aircraft before retiring several months ago. He was headed to the West Coast with his family when he heard about Gustave Whitehead. Now his wife is in Oregon and Cartabiano is here working on No. 21.

“When I heard about it, I told them to give me a sketch and I would tell them if they were wasting their time,” he said. “I looked at it and I saw that it has all the characteristics of the ultralights that people are flying today.”