Everyone has heard of the Wright brothers. Of course - the first flight, a great event for all people. Have you heard of Gustav Albin Whitehead too? Few would say yes. By the way, this is also an aviation pioneer, designer, inventor and, quite possibly, the first person who made the first flight … a little earlier than the famous brothers.
Whitehead in his first glider.
From childhood, the Bavarian boy Gustav was interested in birds flying, and after the death of his parents he was trained as a mechanic and emigrated to the United States. There, he built gliders and "flew" on them, although he was a rather large man. And then, in Pittsburgh, in the late spring of 1899, together with Louis Darvarich, they flew at an altitude of 6-8 m, "long" about 750 meters on a monoplane, crashed into a building and received burns and injuries.
Gustav Whitehead and his 1901 monoplane.
Whitehead did not fly again in Pittsburgh: he was banned. But there was another, more famous flight, which the press wrote about (even the New York Herald and Boston Transcript), which took place in Connecticut on August 14, 1901. And two super-long ones, on January 17, 1902, two and seven kilometers long. But … the planes "appropriated" the famous Wright, and Whitehead made engines, and his aircraft kept in the open air became unusable.
Gustav with one of his first motors.
Here is one of these aircraft, and I wanted to tell you more. In 1911, Whitehead's name reappeared in the press when he experimented with his own helicopter project.
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It is known to be a 60-blade machine, built around 1911-12. It was built for Lee S. Burridge, founder and president of the American Aviation Society. Reports indicated that the 75 hp engine driven a rotating drum, and the blades were driven by a drum through a system of pulleys. Silk cords were used to transmit the power of the engine, and the pulleys and propellers were made of aluminum.
You can also find out that the car, although it was built, had an unenviable fate, having stood all its life on earth. One of the clients who ordered the motors from Gustav sued him for disrupting the production time. And he won. As a result, Whitehead was taken away from his workshop, all documents and mechanisms.
The blueprints have survived, quite * literate * both mechanically and aerodynamically - Gustav Whitehead knew what he was doing!
This ruined the life of the inventor, depriving him of work and dreams of flying and the sky. From 1915, Whitehead worked in a factory as a manual repairman, lost an eye and died in October 27 of a heart attack while removing an engine from a customer's car for repair.