Historian: Smithsonian aviation curator should resign
By John Burgeson
Updated 10:28 pm, Sunday, August 18, 2013
BRIDGEPORT -- John Brown, the aviation expert and historian who has given new life to the argument that Bridgeporter Gustave Whitehead flew first, on Saturday ripped into the Smithsonian Institution for its insistence that the Wright Brothers were first, and he demanded that Tom Crouch, its senior aviation curator, resign his post.
It was Brown who earlier this spring persuaded Jane's All the World's Aircraft, the bible of flying machines, to list Whitehead, not the Wrights, as the first person to break the bonds of gravity in a heavier-than-air controllable airship. In his speech on Saturday before a packed lecture hall in the Discovery Museum, Brown said that the evidence supporting that Whitehead flew first would easily stand up in a court of law, while the Wrights' claim "would fall far short."
Whitehead's supporters say that on Aug. 14, 1901 -- more than two years before the Wrights, the German immigrant achieved sustained, controlled flight in Fairfield. Saturday's event at the Discovery Museum celebrated the 112th anniversary of that flight, and it was attended by Mayor Bill Finch, Stratford Mayor John Harkins, Fairfield First Selectman Mike Tetreau and other VIPs.
The Wright camp maintains that Whitehead's flight lacks witnesses.
"In fact, Whitehead's flights were witnessed by a policeman, a bank vice president, a newspaper reporter, the local undertaker, two engineers and several other people," Brown said. "Eighteen in all, and the Smithsonian will tell you that all of them are liars."
Brown said that one of the five witnesses to the Wrights' flight, John Daniels, didn't make his statement until 32 years later.
"And what he said was: `I saw them take their machine up the hill the fly it down to the beach.' " Brown said. "Now, if someone flies a machine down a hill, does that sound like a sustained flight?"
Another witness, also testifying 32 years later, corroborated Daniels.
"I saw the same thing Mr. Daniels saw," Brown recounted the other man as saying.
Brown, who is now a project manager for a German aircraft producer, said that there are seven arguments that the so-called "Wright wing" makes to discredit Whitehead supporters: that his wing was inferior, that the Wrights had a better motor, that the Whitehead flyer wasn't controllable, that his propellers were inferior, that there's better documentation for Wrights' flight, that Whitehead's flight wasn't "reproducible" and that today's aircraft are more like the Wright Flyer than Whitehead's.
In Saturday's talk, Brown debunked every one of those claims. He said that a careful analysis of photos of Whitehead's flyer shows that it did, in fact, have a wing-warping mechanism to steer it, a tail assembly, or empennage, that included a vertical rudder, allowing it to achieve controlled flight.
"Wing-warping was, in fact, invented by Mr. Whitehead right here in Bridgeport, Connecticut," Brown said.
He also noted that Whitehead was a skilled engine builder, and his acetylene-powered motors were sought after by several other aviation pioneers around the world for their high power and light weight. Brown also said that unlike the Wrights, who he described as "self-taught bicycle mechanics," Whitehead was at the leading edge of the then-infant field of aviation.
"His first job in the U.S. was at an institution you might have heard about -- Harvard University," Brown said. "He was a kite maker in their meteorology department." Brown, who worked for a time as an aviation historian at the Smithsonian, demanded that Smithsonian's Crouch resign for his insistence that the Wright Flyer, which hangs in the Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C., was the first machine piloted by a human to fly. Brown also called on the Smithsonian, "which is supported by your tax dollars" to scrap the contract that it has with the Wright family. This contract prevents the museum from claiming that anyone but the Wrights made it in the air first, in return for displaying the Wright Flyer.
"Any engineering analysis of the Wright Flyer -- its lift, its mass, its drag, power and so forth, will demonstrate that it could not have flown," Brown said.
In fact, a reproduction of the Wright Flyer failed miserably when an attempt was made to fly it in Kitty Hawk on the centennial of that "first flight."
But reproductions of the Whitehead flyer have flown, one in Germany, the other at Sikorsky Memorial Airport.
Brown asked the crowd of more than 150 to "look in their attics and basements for diaries kept by grand- and great-grandparents" for passages that might refer to the Whitehead achievement, noting that more proof would help the Whitehead case. He pointed out that Crouch is from Dayton, Ohio, the hometown to the Wrights.
Brown also urged the crowd to "write to their senators and congressmen" to get the Smithsonian to "adopt accepted academic standards" in its research on aviation.
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