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IF GOD INTENDED MAN TO FLY

As the century broke over America, there was another really tough technical problem receiving huge amounts of attention from small-time inventors across the land: airplanes. In fact, McBride’s magazine wrote in 1903 that

probably no other single subject, save that of navigation of air, have so much thought and energy been expended as upon the conservation and utilization of the power exerted upon our sea-coasts by the force of waves. And certainly since the days of alchemists and astrologers few themes of thought pursued for practical ends have resulted in so little reward to their students.16

Just two years before, Rear Admiral George Melville, chief engineer of the U.S. Navy, had issued a similar condemnation of air travel. Melville thundered,

Outside of the proven impossible, there probably can be found no better example of the speculative tendency carrying man to the verge of the chimerical than in his attempts to imitate the birds, or of no field where so much incentive seed has been sewn with so little return as in the attempts of man to fly successfully through the air. Never, it would seem, has the human mind so persistently evaded the issue, begged the question, and ‘wrangling resolutely upon the facts’ insisted upon dreams being accepted as actual performance, as when there has been proclaimed time and again the proximate and perfect utility of the balloon or of the flying machine.17

However, doubters did not stop Californians from trying to fly and harness the oceans. Unlike us, they didn’t know how the story of aviation and wave motors turned out. Both these crazy dreams were united in one southern Californian, Alva Reynolds, who was both an inventor of an aircraft he called the Man Angel and a wave motor in the first decade of the twentieth century.

The Man Angel was lighter-than-air and had paddles like a rowboat that the aviator could pump. Strange as it sounds, it flew the skies of Los Angeles to the delight of thousands.18

Reynolds’s wave machine, designed with his brother George, received a glowing write-up in the Los Angeles Herald. The Reynolds was “perfect in detail” and would not break. “If any wave motor of which I have knowledge will be a success the Reynolds is the one,” said a local engineer who also happened to be a director of the newly formed California Wave Motor Company. The paper editorialized that “the enormous value of such a motor to the world is almost beyond the grasp of the mortal mind.”19

At face value, the article seems to indicate that the motor was nearly ready for action. A large drawing of the Reynolds wave motor sat beside the headline, “Will Generate Electricity By Ocean Waves.” Another Rube Goldberg machine, it was to be built like a pier. There were vanes on the pylons that would spin when the waves came in, turning a crank that would pump seawater to a reservoir on shore, where it would run down through a standard hydroelectric generator.

How fortuitous that a new company would receive such a tremendous write-up in a major Los Angeles newspaper—and just a month after putting out a stock offering! Unfortunately, it appears to be the result of some underhanded dealings. The company’s stock offering prospectus reveals that the managing editor of the Los Angeles Herald, Frank E. Wolfe, was actually a director of the company. The Herald article conveniently left off his name from the list of company directors printed in the paper.20

The company had a model of their invention built at 21st Street in Huntington Beach in 1909. They claimed to have “passed the point where we must stand over a working model and argue with crowds of skeptics as to whether or not our motors will work in the ocean.” But then the trail goes cold. Certainly, the wave motor did not ever become anything close to a commercial success. By 1911 Reynolds had lowered his sights, filing a patent on a technology to protect pylons from barnacles and parlaying it into a new company, the Common Sense Pile Protector Company.21

Another wave motor inventor,