NOW, WHITEHEAD - PETER GARRISON
NOW,
WHI T EHE A D History is written by the victors, they say. They also say that the saddest words of tongue or pen are, “It might have been!” And so, in view of the manifest sadness of history, let us pause to pay heed to what was not, and to give some honour to the vanquished. AMERICANS’ NATIONAL LOVE AFFAIR with the Wright brothers blinds them to competing claims of priority. From time to time, however, another would-be first-flyer clambers into view. The most recent to do so was Gustave Whitehead, a Connecticut experimenter who is said to have made a powered, controlled flight in 1901, two years before the Wrights’ 852-foot hop at Kitty Hawk.
In a certain sense, who was first means little. So many claimants emerge, all around the turn of the 20th century, that it’s obvious that the aeroplane was an invention whose time had come. All the necessary components had been put into place by a parade of thinkers and experimenters stretching back a hundred years. Some of these early theorists, largely obscure today, were quite remarkable. It’s difficult for us today to empty our minds of everything we know about flight and to appreciate the perspicacity of Sir George Cayley, a British peer of extraordinary intellectual and practical abilities, who figured out, prior to 1800, most of what is taught today in ground school about stability, control, and the four forces acting upon an aeroplane in flight.
P R OP UL S I ON A ND L I F T S HOUL D B E S EPA R AT ED
Not that Whitehead, who died in 1927, has returned to speak for himself; instead, the editor of Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft, Paul Jackson, in the preface to the 2013 edition, awarded to Whitehead the honour of having made the first powered heavier-than-air flight. This claim has been made on Whitehead’s behalf before, and has always been controversial; what was noteworthy in 2013 was that it appeared in the prestigious Jane’s. It was like the normally Olympian New England Journal of Medicine’s recent descent to earth to condemn Donald Trump.
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April 2021
I am in awe of minds that cut through superficial appearances and received ideas to arrive at the simple essences of things. It was Cayley who realised – a leap that escaped even the
