Category Archives: Aviation history

First Flight From Aircraft Carrier, 1922

A hundred years ago today, October 17, 1922, marked the first time that an aircraft took off from a U.S. aircraft carrier, the USS Langley (CV-1). While aircraft had previously taken off from ships, this was the first time that a ship specifically designed for that purpose had been used. The ship had previously been a collier in World War 1, and had been newly converted. That first plane was piloted by Lt. Virgil C. Griffin.

The ship had served as a collier in World War I, and was converted to a seaplane tender prior to World War II, in which she also served. The ship was damaged in 1942 and scuttled.

1922 Radio Scouting

We’re not told exactly what these scouts were doing, but it was obviously important. While the plane flies over, one is watching with the binoculars, and the other is listening to some important message on the radio.

The illustration, by Douglas Duer, appeared a hundred years ago this month in the June 1922 issue of Boys’ Life.

The issue contained a number of features about wireless, including one fiction story, as well as detailed instructions for constructing a crystal set. It also included this sad tale of the sinking of the SS Grøntoft.

Navy Needs 500,000 Model Airplanes: 1942

Eighty years ago this month, this naval officer was explaining to these scouts the finer points of model airplane construction. But it wasn’t just fun and games. These model airplanes were vital to the Navy’s training program, and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox had called upon the youth of America to make a half million scale models–10,000 each of 50 different fighting planes.

In the April 1942 issue of Boys’ Life, Chief Scout Executive James E. West stressed how Scouts were especially equipped to handle this call. Models were had to be exact replicas of the ally and enemy planes, and were to be built to a precise scale of 1:72. At this scale, a model 35 feet away is identical to the true airplane at just under half a mile. Thus, Navy men could use these models for aircraft recognition, range estimation, formation flying, and other phases of the training program.

Inspectors would review each model, which had to be perfect. Upon passing inspection, the model planes would immediately be put into service for training. Plans would be in the possession of schools, and the Navy pointed out that modern war was so complex that it demanded the skills of all, including the boy of 12, to provide some of the services and materials needed by our forces.

According to the Navy, “it is scarcely necessary to stir the interest of American boys and girls in aviation, since many of them expect to grow up to be pilots, and this project channels that interest toward an educational objective of immediate value.”

Elsewhere in the same issue, to give Scouts a head start, appeared the guide at left to recognizing some of the enemy’s planes.

1921 Vacuum Airship

The November 1921 issue of Science & Invention contains an idea that I thought of independently. A lighter-than-aircraft relies upon the fact that a gas such as hydrogen or helium is lighter than air. But instead of filling the balloon with hydrogen or helium, you’ll get even more lift if you fill it with vacuum!

The idea had been proposed, and the article, penned by H. Winfield Secor was entitled, “Is the vacuum airship practical?” There was reportedly one under construction in Italy. Despite my having the idea, and despite the Italians trying to make one, I’ve never heard of such a thing, and Secor explains the probable reason:

Stop to think for a moment just what kind of construction will have to be employed in building compartments capable of being exhausted to almost a perfect vacuum. You will remember that our physics books taught us that unless a chamber is very strong, it would collapse, due to atmospheric pressure, when a perfect vacuum was produced. It would thus seem that after we have built an airship with compartments strong enough to withstand the outside atmospheric pressure when the air is pumped out of them, we can hardly expect the airship to rise, even if it only has to carry up its own frame.

Lo and behold, Wikipedia has an entry for vacuum airship, and the idea has been around since at least 1670. But undoubtedly for the reasons stated a century ago, the idea literally never got off the ground.

US Post Office Airmail Radio System: 1921

A hundred years ago this month, the April 1921 issue of Popular Mechanics described the radio network of the U.S. Post Office Department. At a cost of $26,000, the post office had put together a string of 15 stations–10 owned by the post office, and 5 others shared with other government departments–to facilitate the carrying of airmail across the country.

65 airplanes were in use transporting 200,000 letters daily, and to manage the system and provide meteorological data, radio was necessary. The first one, shown here, was established at College Park, MD. Others were at Bellefonte, PA, St. Louis, MO, Omaha and North Platte, NE, Cheyenne and Rock Springs, WY, Salt Lake City, UT, and Elko and Reno, NV.

Work on the system had begun in 1920, and at press time, sixteen radio men were in the employ of the department. Plans were in the works to equip planes with radio direction finding equipment and radiotelephones.

1921 Creed Automatic Radiotelegraphy System

No. 7W/3 Reperforator, manufactured by Creed and Company Limited, Croydon, London, England, 1925

Creed No. 7W/3 Reperforator (1925). Image courtesy of Science Museum Group Collection, © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum, U.K. released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.

No. I.T. Morse Tape Printer (1925). Image courtesy of Science Museum Group Collection, © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum, U.K., released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.

The two devices shown above represent a hundred year old method of automatically decoding International Morse Code. They, along with the sending device, are described in the March 1921 issue of Radio News.

At the sending end, the message is typed on a typewriter-like keyboard and punched onto a paper tape. An example of the tape is shown below. It’s not immediately obvious that the tape contains Morse code, but upon closer observation, it is. A “dot” is indicated by one hole directly above another hole. A “dash” is indicated by two holes that are slanted. Once you see this, the Morse code is obvious. The first word shown here is “the.” The first two holes are slanted. This is a single dash for the letter T. This is followed by four sets of holes, one directly above the other–four dots, for the letter H. Next, there is a single set of vertical holes, another dot for the letter E.

Once this tape is produced, it is sent through another machine which keys the transmitter and sends the Morse signal over the air.

At the receiving station, the two machines shown above are used to receive and print the message. The reperforator (top) connects to the receiver and produces an exact duplicate of the paper tape. Then, the paper tape is fed into the Morse Tape Printer, which prints the message on a paper tape.

The process was known as the Creed Automatic System, named after inventor Frederick G. Creed, an important figure in the development of the teleprinter. At the beginning of the 20th Century, Creed was told my none less than Lord Kelvin that “there is no future in that idea.” Undaunted, he managed to sell twelve machines to the British post office in 1902. The 1921 machine described for use with wireless telegraphy appears to be a variation of that device.

By the late 1920s, the company was producing teleprinter equipment using a variant of the five-bit Baudot code. The company became part of IT&T, and Creed retired from the company in 1930. Among his later projects was the “Seadrome,” a floating airport which could be placed along international air routes. The project is described in a March 1939 article in the Glascow Herald, and was undoubtedly a casualty of both the War and increased aircraft range. The Seadrome is the subject of US Patent 2238974, applied for in February 1939 and granted in April 1941.

The images above are copyrighted and provided courtesy of the Science Museum Group, U.K., where they are on display, and released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.

Heath Parasol: 1931

Most of our readers are quite familiar with Heathkits, since starting in 1947, the Heath Company sold kits for a wide variety of electronic devices. But the company actually got its start in 1926 with the product shown here, a Heathkit airplane, namely, the Heath Parasol. About a thousand of the kits were sold in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

The ad here appeared 90 years ago this month in the January 1931 issue of Popular Mechanics.

1960 Aerial Platform

Sixty years ago this month, the February 1960 issue of Electronics Illustrated the “radio powered sky station” shown here. It was an artist’s conception of the Raytheon Airborne Microwave Platform. It could be used for either civilian or military purposes, but would establish a platform 65,000 feet in the air. From there, it could relay radio or television signals, or serve as part of the nation’s missile defense system.

The craft would be stationary above its power source, which consisted of a beam of microwave energy. This was picked up by an antenna on the bottom. It was rectified, and the resulting energy was used to power the propeller as well as the electronic payload.

I’ve never heard of this system being deployed, probably because the bugs never got worked out. This once classified 1965 military report (authored by Raytheon) speaks in glowing terms of the feasibility of the project (which presumably needed just a few more million dollars). However, as of 1965, successful experiments consisted of the successful use for ten continuous hours at 50 feet, a far cry from the 65,000 feet planned. And to keep the craft over the microwave beam, a tether was employed, which would probably be impractical at 65,000 feet.

It seems like an ambitious project for 1960, but it’s probably quite possible today. It seems to me that battery and solar technology will soon be at a point (if they’re not there already) where it’s possible to have a craft that will stay aloft indefinitely. And unlike the 1960 vision, it wouldn’t need to stay above a fixed point. If a craft can stay aloft indefinitely, this means that it can fly anywhere in the world.

It also seems to me that an autonomous military vehicle could derive its power from the enemy’s power grid. When it needed a charge, it could roost on a convenient power line. In fact, it could probably get its power inductively from an AC power line merely by flying close.

1945 Army Flight Nurse

Shown here, in the February 12, 1945, issue of Life magazine is U.S. Army flight nurse Lt. Victoria Pavlowski, giving a glass of juice to Pvt. Charles V. Reusch, who is being evacuated from Leyte to a hospital in Hawaii. Lt. Pavlowski, described by the magazine as “young, courageous, and pretty,” was among the first class of flight nurses, and was working the 18-hour round-trip flight evacuating injured servicemen from the Pacific theater.

The Life article was penned by Shelley Smith Mydans, who with her photographer husband had been captured in Manila and spent two years in a Japanese internment camp. (We previously wrote about her capture.) She described the group of nurses as “very young, almost like college girls, sitting cross-legged on their beds, smoking and laughing. Their make-up was fresh, their nails brightly polished and their man-sized khakis and flight suits less baggy than the modern coed uniform.”

Lt. Pavlowski went on to marry another officer, and retired from the Army some 20 years later as Maj. Victoria Dragoui. She was profiled in Warrior Medic magazine in 2011, from which the picture at left is taken. She died in 2010 at the age of 98.

1919 Aeronautical – Radio Wedding

We’ve previously reported two aeronautical weddings via radio, in April 1922 and June 1922.
Those, however, were not the first, since the wedding of Lt. George Burgess and Emily K. Schaefer took place in 1919. The bride and groom were in one plane, piloted by the groom. The minister, Rev. Dr. Alexander Wouters was in another plane piloted by best man Lt. Eugene Barksdale. The event took place at the Police Field Day festivities at the Sheepshead Bay Speedway near New York City.

A receiver hooked to a large public address system was in place on the ground, allowing the gathered guests to hear the entire ceremony. At 5:10 PM, the planes took off from the speedway. As those on the ground listened, the minister began to read the ceremony, and the couple exchanged vows. A few minutes later, one of the planes announced “we are coming down,” and the bride and groom landed to applause and waving hats. As the couple moved to an automobile, the bridal party rode past the stands while the police band played the wedding march.

Sadly, Lt. Burgess died in a firy plane crash in 1925 at New Salem, PA. After an airshow in Washington, he was flying to Dayton Ohio with an editor and photographer from the Dayton Herald. In a thunderstorm, the plane crashed to the ground, killing all aboard. His obituary described him as a wireless expert and instructor in radio airplane communications. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The couple had two children. The bride died in 1969 at the age of 77.

The best man also died in an airplane crash in 1926. Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana is named in his memory.

OneTubeRadio.com

Radio – Emergency Preparedness – Scouting – Law – Politics