The Airplane - Jay Spenser [46]
Slightly built with dark hair and eyes, John Montgomery lifted his creation high. He slipped a leg over an underslung wooden keel padded like a saddle. Weighing 40 pounds (18 kilograms), this glider might have been too small for others, but Montgomery himself weighed just 130 pounds (59 kilograms). The craft had stubby wings and a fan-shaped tail like that hawk’s. Sunshine on its taut cotton covering made him squint.
Montgomery’s sister Jane had stitched the fabric back at the family ranch. Everything else he had built himself. For the wing’s ribs he had chosen ash, a strong and springy wood favored by Native Americans for hunting bows. Steam-softening thin strips of this wood, he dried them in forms, lending them the curved contour he had selected for his artificial wings.
What’s interesting is the wing shape Montgomery chose. It was a parabolic curve, perhaps the first ever used by a human being to fly. John Montgomery had learned the right lesson from studying birds.
Montgomery looked at his brother. James stood ready a dozen steps down the slope, a rope in his hand tied to the glider’s front.
“Now!” John shouted, rushing forward.
James took off headlong down the slope, yanking hard on the rope to slingshot the glider into the air. Releasing the tether as instructed, he watched in awe as his brother sailed past in full flight. His elation turned to fear as the glider continued down the hill, then to relief as John touched down safely on his own two feet.
He ran to join his brother. Carrying the glider, they trudged back up the hill and paced off the distance as they went. John J. Montgomery had flown 600 feet (180 meters). “There was a little run and a jump and I found myself launched in the air,” he later wrote. “A peculiar sensation came over me. The first feeling in placing myself at the mercy of the wind was that of fear. Immediately after came a feeling of security when I realized the solid support given by the wing-surface. And that support was of a very peculiar nature. There was a cushiony softness about it, yet it was firm. When I found the machine would follow any movement in the seat for balancing, I felt I was self-buoyant.”9
Montgomery’s may have been the first manned glider to fly in the Western Hemisphere. It would be another ten years before Otto Lilienthal took up gliding in Germany.
Born in 1858 in Yuba City, California, John Joseph Montgomery had come into the world aching to fly. His mother later recounted how as a toddler John lay on a pillow, flapping his arms and vividly imagining himself aloft. As Montgomery grew older, he built kites and savored the elemental connection they provided to the wind and sky. Large soaring birds, a prominent feature of the American West, fascinated him.
Montgomery was living in the San Francisco area when in July 1869, at age eleven, he attended the public testing of an unmanned flying machine by elderly northern California newspaper publisher Frederick Marriott. Called the Avitor Hermes Jr. (avitor being a variant of the word aviator), this dirigible-airplane hybrid flew under the impulse of a 1-hp steam engine. The lumbering machine’s sausage-shaped gasbag made it only slightly heavier than air, allowing it to fly.
Marriott had been interested in flight ever since his days a quarter century before as an officer of Great Britain’s Henson Aerial Steam Carriage company. Yes, here was the same Frederick Marriott who had commissioned the evocative artwork showing the world what the airplane would someday be. While his post–Civil War Avitor Hermes Jr. was the first powered flying machine to fly in North America, however, it was also a technological dead end.
John Montgomery’s flight of 1883 appears to have been the last of his youthful experiments. He earned a Ph.D. and pursued a teaching career in northern California. Dabbling in aviation over the passing