Today in Technology History
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March 12
Today, we continue our celebration of the centennial of flight with the story of the first non-Wright airplane flight in America -- exactly 95 years ago.
The flight was a project of the Aerial Experiment Association, a small team brought together by none other than Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. Based in Canada, the team's first manned flight was actually in a kite in 1907.
Next they started working on powered flight, and they built an aircraft covered with red fabric. The plane had a wingspan of about 45 feet, and its upper and lower wings bowed inward toward one another at the tips. The aircraft had a 40-horsepower, eight-cylinder gasoline engine. This plane, the Red Wing, was designed by Thomas Selfridge, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army who had been part of Bell's team. However, Selfridge was called back to active duty, so he never got to fly his creation.
Instead, the pilot for the Red Wing's only flight was engineer Frederick Walker "Casey" Baldwin (1882-1948). He became the first Canadian to fly an airplane when, on March 12, 1908, the Red Wing took off from frozen Lake Keuka, just outside Hammondsport, New York. The airplane reached an altitude of 200 feet before the tail fell apart and the went down. The landing -- or crash, really -- didn't harm Baldwin, although the plane was badly damaged. The distance from the point of takeoff to the landing was almost 319 feet. The experiment was deemed a success, and the Bell team learned lessons that they used in their later designs.
Some newspapers described the flight of the Red Wing as the first "public" airplane flight in America, although the Wright brothers certainly had already had witnesses (and even reporters) observing some of their flights. Later in the year, we'll write more about the Bell team and its members -- including Lt. Selfridge, the designer of the Red Wing, who became the first person to die in an airplane crash.
Related links:
Click here and here to read more about Casey Baldwin and the Red Wing.
Click here and here to read more about Bell and his Aerial Experiment Association.
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