First to fly?

Air Classics, Feb 2002 by Jensen, Megan, Pahl, Gerard

THE STRANGE AERONAUTICAL SAGA Of AUGUSTUS HERRING - WAS HE THE FIRST POWERED HEAVIER-THAN-AIR PILOT?

A cool winter wind menaced the dunes as wisps iof sand featheyed across the beach. After experimenting for several years, the young aeronaut was about to make - perhaps - the first powered airplane flight in history. Though he had years of experience in gliding, the intrepid experimenter's heart was pounding. Wetting his lips, he engaged the engine, launched the wing and wire aero machine and was quickly airborne! The following account was printed in a local paper: "It (the machine) was really flying. Already the machine had covered a distance of 50 or 60 feet when the speed perceptibly slackened and a little farther on the apparatus came to rest gently on the sand."

For most Americans, the names of Wilbur and Orville Wright conjure up images of the world's first airplane sailing through the air in humankind's first powered flight. However, the above newspaper account is not from North Carolina's Charlotte Observer, it was not written about an event that took place on 17 December 1903, and it was not about the Wright brothers! Instead, it was submitted by William Murphy, special correspondent to the Chicago Record, and was printed in the Elmira, New York, Daily Advertiser.

Remarkably, the article was about a forgotten aviation pioneer by the name of Augustus Herring who was living in St. Joseph, Michigan, but most remarkably, the date was 10 October 1898, a full five years before the Wrights would make their famous flights! For those who have researched the subject, it is generally accepted that Herring achieved an airborne status on that eventful day. But should Herring be awarded the title "First to Fly?"

His craft was the result of just as exhaustive study, design and testing as that of the Wright brothers. The machine was a biplane flyer powered by a compressed air engine. On his first test, Herring ran along the beach into an approximately 25-mile per hour headwind. He engaged the engine, causing two large screw propellers to whirl frantically and the wood and cloth contraption to lift off the ground. In testimony given in 1921, Herring said machine shop operator William Engberg and his sponsor Matthias C. Arnot witnessed the flight. One would also assume that the reporter was present, unless he received the story second hand.

The St. Joseph, Michigan, Evening Press ran an article on 1 October 1898, about Herring's experiments in heavier-- than-air flight so the attempt was anticipated. Herring's 10 October success (which is often reported as being on the lith) resulted in Herring inviting well-respected aerial investigators Octave Chanute and Notre Dame math professor Albert Zahm, who came to see the machine perform. The feat, however, could not be repeated on the following day (11 th) because the wind had let up and Herring could not pressurize the air bottles - telegraph records and weather reports confirm these dates.

Then on, 22 October, Herring is reported to have made the second successful flight of what may have been the first powered airplane in history. This time it was written about by the local media and the Chicago newspapers, though again one cannot be sure the reporter was actually on the beach or was told what had happened.

This flight was 73 feet in length. The following was printed in the Benton Harbor, Michigan, The Evening News, 24 October 1898: "The results of today's experiment is important in that it is probably the first time in the world's history that a true flying machine (a power-driven machine heavier than the air it displaces) has ever carried its operator in successful flight." Unfortunately, there were no photographs to accompany the newspaper articles and the one photo of the flight that exists was taken at such an angle that one cannot tell if Herring was truly airborne.

Who was this Herring fellow? Actually, Augustus Moore Herring was quite a pioneer during the very earliest days of heavier-than-air flight. And whether one wants to argue for or against the significance of his contributions or, more importantly, if he was the first to succeed in powered flight, one has to admit, after reviewing the evidence, that the St. Joseph resident certainly made an impact.

Herring, and many other early experimenters, were all moving toward a nexus point, that inevitable point of no return where all of the elements needed for a critical change in the history of the world were about to come together. Even as a child Herring could feel it in his bones that he was destined to prove that man could fly. Born in 1867, he was the son of a very wealthy and aristocratic Georgia cotton broker and his wife, William Francis Herring and Chloe Berry Conyers. Herring attended schools in Switzerland and Germany and when his family moved to New York in 1884, Augustus, then 16, entered Stevens Institute of Technology of Hoboken, New Jersey. While there he began to build models of flying machines by 1888 and actually built a full-sized glider by 1893 - one which could not carry his weight and which he wrecked while trying to get his smallish 150-pound frame off the ground. He was also testing models he had built that were rubber powered - one with a four-foot wingspan flew almost seven seconds and supposedly covered a distance of 135 feet. In another attempt he tried to make use of a pendulum to stabilize the aircraft; it was not a success.