Publication: Pioneers of the Air
By Dylan Potter
In the stories of inventions, from the telescope to the telephone, history does not always provide the whole truth. Because it is simpler to credit an invention to one man (and it is usually a man), the histories of inventions can tend to obscure other people, especially those who often develop similar ideas at similar times. On top of this, just because a thing has been invented by someone, doesn’t mean he or she can make it work. Leonardo Da Vinci famously designed a helicopter and a submarine, but he could never make them work.
We all know who invented the aeroplane. It was the Wright Brothers, right? Well, yes…but also, no.
You have to step back further into history to find the truth. It was Sir George Cayley, right back in 1805, almost exactly a century before the Wright brothers flew the very first glider, after designing both a helicopter and an aero-machine which were both powered by gunpowder. His success in turn, inspired a generation of aviation fanatics who were determined to develop his ideas further.
Even a decade after the Wright brothers flew their first plane, most people and especially governments, believed that aviation or ‘heavier-than-air’ flight was impractical and certainly impossible for long distance journeys of high altitude. Why? Because of balloons.
The world in the 19th and early 20th century was balloon crazy. In fact, anybody with any spare cash, and you needed a lot of spare cash to get into ballooning, could get a balloon into the air and fly long distances. They called these avid balloonists ‘balloonatics.’
And when the mighty Zeppelins, airships kept afloat by hydrogen (highly flammable), took to the air in Germany, it was clear to most western military powers that balloons really were the way forward.
But the ‘heavier-than-air’ guys, believed to be simply insane, still persisted all over Europe and America. On the 17th December 1903, however, brothers Orville and Wilber Wright flew their flying machine, the Kitty Hawk, three miles at a rate of eight miles an hour. They “landed at a point selected in advance” (according to the Daily Mail), in North Carolina. They went on to make another 100 flights in 1904. However, it was a man named Octave Chanute, a railway engineer, who developed the plans that the Wright brothers used in their designs.
Of course, the Wrights really kick-started the whole thing. But the problem was that no-one was interested in investing in the aeroplane! They tried to sell their prototypes to both the American and British military, but no-one wanted to sell. They were too interested in their balloons.
And so we jump several years to 1908 when the Wright brothers were desperately trying to sell their invention. During this year two more brothers; the Short brothers, engineers in the newly formed Aero Club, worked together with a man called CS Rolls. He was the father of the Rolls Royce and offered the Short brothers the Wrights’ plans for construction in Britain.
They needed an excellent location. It needed to be somewhere at sea level and where they could fly ten minutes in any direction without obstruction. It had to be away from crowds, the press and other intrusions, with good supply of manpower and within easy reach of London. So they chose Leysdown on the isle of Sheppey in Kent. Perfect.
So it was that here, in this quiet corner of Kent, where modern aviation really took off. The Shorts assembled a team of 80 local men and began construction. In May 1909 the Wrights themselves came to the factory and airfields, one of the many visits to the area. As aviation historian Bill Croydon states in his book Early Birds, “The establishment of the Aero Club and the aircraft factory on the Isle of Sheppey acted like a magnet. Aviation in this country had literally taken off, and Sheppey was the centre.”
Soon they were winning prizes and breaking records. In June 1910, CS Rolls became the first man to make a double crossing of the English Channel, from Kent to Sangatte and back. Just one month later he was killed in a flying accident. His death is one of many that occurred during these early days of flight, where there was very little to safeguard the pilot. We can only admire the bravery of these ‘pioneers of the air.’ “I have only admiration for these people striving to break the bond between them and the ground,” said Bill Croydon.
In 1911, the third Gordon Bennett Air Race, one of the greatest events of the day previously held in Rheims, France, and Long Island, New York, came to Sheppey. This spectacular event drew 10,000 spectators who came to watch those ‘magnificent men in their flying machines,’ competing in the air for the coveted Gordon Bennett Trophy.
But dark days were to come. After the Hindenberg disaster in 1937 and as the Germans stockpiled for war, the British finally realised that investment in aeroplanes might just be essential in the looming war. In late 1911, therefore, the first Naval Flying School was established in Sheppey.
In the First World War aeroplanes changed the nature of warfare. British pilots flew on bombing raids to successfully destroy Zeppelin factories in Germany and famed ‘dogfights’ roared across the skies in the Battle of Britain. From that point on, aeroplanes became instruments of war from the Blitz to Hiroshima.
Now the site of the Shorts’ factory is long gone. There is a memorial and a memorial church window, in Eastchurch, to acknowledge what was once there. But Bill Croydon hopes to change all that. He is working hard on a plan to build the ‘Flying Start’ project on Sheppey; a £36 million heritage centre, exploring aviation history in the area. If he’s successful, then the great contribution the people of the isle made to modern aviation will finally be commemorated and generations will learn all about those brave pioneers of the air.