Bryan, Ohio Was At The Forefront Of The Pioneering Of Aviation
Ohio is famous in aviation history for providing the Wright Brothers, who were supposedly the first to design and fly a powered, non-balloon type aircraft in 1903. Williams County staked their claim to fame with Bryan being a stopover point between Cleveland and Chicago in the first national coast-to-coast airmail route. Air flight was still a new and novel mode of transportation back in those days, but thanks to men like Stanley Vaughn, Williams County residents had long been exposed to this new, cutting edge form of travel.
It was back in 1909 that Stanley I. Vaughn brought one of the earliest forms of powered air travel to the area, a Toledo-manufactured Strobel Airship, which he demonstrated at the Bryan Homecoming in August of that year. The Strobel was sort of a weird looking bird…essentially a dirigible made up of a sausage-shaped balloon, tethered to a long, scaffold-like metal undercarriage, upon which rested the engine connected to the paddle-type propeller at the tail, the crude steering rudder assembly at the front, and the pilot who uncomfortably straddled the undercarriage in between.
On August 12, the airship was paraded around the courthouse square in Bryan, with throngs of local citizens turning out to see the newfangled machine. Two flights were made on this day, both of which went off without incident.
On August 13 however, a Friday, the luck of Vaughn and his Strobel Airship ran out, and in a big way. Being essentially a ‘lighter-than-air’ vehicle, the dirigible, like any balloon, was highly susceptible to anomalies in wind currents aloft. One of those wind currents hit the airship while aloft, knocking it out of the control of Vaughn. The airship slammed into buildings on Main Street, tearing open the gas bag, breaking the rudder, and sending it down where it crashed, tail first, on Lynn Street. No one was injured in the crash, but for Vaughn this was his second brush with catastrophe as an earlier flight that year saw his airship going down in the Maumee River. He survived both crashes, and three decades later, he brought his pioneering expertise to bear against the Axis powers during World War II.
Born in 1887, Stanley first experienced flight when he took off in a glider near Cleveland in 1907. After his experience with dirigibles, he became a convert to the airplane, building and flying his first one shortly afterward. Later, Vaughn joined the Curtiss Airplane Company. It was there that he helped America and the Allies gain air superiority during World War II, but not before he left his mark on another historical first.
As his grandson, Stanley I. Vaughn III, said in a note from 2008, “My grandfather started out working for Curtiss at the New York and Hammondsport facilities (NC-4 flying boats, Curtiss racers, etc.) as factory manager. During his tenure at New York, a young aviator landed at the airfield, ready to attempt a Trans-Atlantic flight to Paris. Upon his arrival, he noticed that the aluminum spinner on his aircraft had developed a fatigue crack, and requested the Curtiss folks to fix it. My grandfather rounded up some sheet metal people, and had them make a hand made new spinner. The aviator was, of course, Charles Lindbergh, who autographed the original spinner and presented it to my grandfather. My grandfather became lifelong friends with Lindbergh, along with other aviation notables such as Foster Lane, George Page, Roscoe Turner, Jimmy Doolittle, General (Frank P.) Lahm, etc. Being exposed to such greats seemed normal for me while growing up.
My grandad went on to be the factory manager at Curtiss Buffalo (JN-4D, P-40, etc.), then went to Curtiss Columbus (SOC3-1, SB2-C Helldiver, B-29 retrofit, P-87, etc.) He finished his career with North American Aviation as head of the experimental division (F-86, FJ-1, FJ-3, F-100).”
Stanley I. Vaughn brought early aviation, complete with its drawbacks, to Williams County. His team at Curtiss brought Charles Lindbergh from New York to Paris, and his Curtiss team later did their part in bringing the free world out from under the shadow of Axis aggression and tyranny. He passed away in Columbus in 1972 at the age of 85.
The First Coast-To-Coast Air Mail Route…
From September 23 to 30 in 1911, an experiment took place that would revolutionize the communications world. A daily round trip air mail test route commenced at this time, running between Garden City and Mineola, New York. The distance was just a few miles, and the first delivery, dropping a sack of letters and postcards from a height of 500 feet, caused the sack to rupture, scattering mail everywhere.
It was ugly. It needed serious refinements, but it proved to be viable. On May 15, 1918, the first established air mail route went into effect, running between New York, New York and Washington D.C., with a stop at Philadelphia. This too proved to be in need of refinements…but it was still a success. The next step was obvious…the development of a coast-to-coast air mail system.
The original New York – Philadelphia – Washington D.C. route was retained, while planning got underway for the development of an air mail route that would run between New York and San Francisco. The route eventually consisted of three main zones, divided into thirteen stops.
Mail coming westward out of New York in the New York – Chicago zone would make its first changeover at the smallest community in the route…Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. The mail would leave there for its next stop…Cleveland, Ohio. Chicago was the final stop in the first zone, but the jump from Cleveland to Chicago was simply too far for the planes of the day, especially for the planes that were using the World War I Liberty engine. Although it packed 400 horsepower, the Liberty seemed to have an annoying flaw for every horse, and failures were not uncommon. While the bugs were being worked out of the Liberty, a final stopover between Cleveland and Chicago was necessary. Bryan, Ohio became the second smallest community on the route when it was selected to take part in the history of air mail delivery, with a landing strip, hangar and official U.S. Airmail exchange point located at what today is the northeastern corner of the intersection of North Main and East Foster Streets, at a place that became known as Willett Field.
On August 20, 1920, the route officially opened. By 1925, Bryan, Ohio was once again at the forefront of the Air Age, and early pioneers of the aviation industry were flying in and out of the Fountain City on a regular basis. A letter from New York to San Francisco would take 34 hours and 45 minutes at arrive, mail station to mail station. The same trip heading east did not have to battle headwinds, and only took 32 hours and 5 minutes. Although they were not blindingly fast by today’s standards, the calculation had changed from weeks to hours in transit time. Then there’s the other detail…the cost. A letter from Bryan to San Francisco, sent via air mail, would have cost the sender the top rate of the day, 24 cents. In modern money, that two bits of 1920 would equate to $2.98 today.
Art Smith – The Smash-Up Kid Who Never Gave Up…
It was 1920…the dawn of the ‘Roaring Twenties’. In the aviation field however, the party had been underway for more than a decade. In the day and age when airplanes were being built in barns using wood, cloth, and bailing or piano wire, anyone who chose to take to the skies was immediately branded as a daredevil. There was no FAA to set standards of any kind. Success meant taking off and landing as it was drawn up to be, and soaking in the admiration that came along with it.
On the other side of the coin though, when it came to early aviation, failure and funeral were often interchangeable terms. To put it into modern vernacular, fly boys were the rock stars of their day, and many a young man sought adulation behind the controls of an underpowered, rickety flying machine. There was money aplenty to be made doing exhibitions, and hey…chicks dig aviators. One of those early pioneers of aviation was Arthur Roy Smith of Fort Wayne.
Born in 1890 and fascinated by the prospect of flight since he was fifteen, Smith was an adrenaline junkie of the first order. He loved the mechanics of motion, and even raced mini-cars, but his first love, other than his beloved Aimee Cour (who eventually became Mrs. Art Smith), was flying. “There are no frontiers for the aeroplane,” Smith said prophetically in his 1915 autobiography. “The seacoast is only a green, wavering line thousands of feet below it. Mountains are just heaps of earth—it skims over them. There are no boundaries between States or countries when you look down upon them from three thousand feet in the air.”
Thousands would eventually come out and pay to see the ‘Bird Boy of Fort Wayne’, who also carried the nickname, ‘Smash-up Kid’, a title Smith earned by his multitude of crashes that demolished his planes…but not him. As he gained worldwide fame, he also gained perspective of the future of aeronautics. As the opening lines of his autobiography state, “People are not interested in me. They are interested in my flying. When the crowd on the ground holds its breath, or shrieks, or wildly cheers, it is not because Art Smith is playing a dangerous game with death up there in the clouds. It is because over their heads, a man just like themselves is mastering the dangers of an almost unknown element. My triumphs are not personal. They are new triumphs for all mankind.”
“The greatest barrier between people is distance,” he continued. “Think what fifteen miles meant in the days when the only way to cover them was to walk them step by step. Fifteen miles away—it was an undiscovered country! Then railroads came, and street-cars, and automobiles. A man lives fifteen miles from his office now, and gets to work every morning on time. Fifteen miles is nothing. Two hundred miles is no more than that to the aeroplane, which will travel easily at 125 to 150 miles an hour.”
Experience is often its own teacher. After surviving numerous crashes and repairing numerous planes, the knowledge and experience gained by Art Smith was translated into high quality airmanship.
On his 21st birthday, Smith signed a contract to appear in the San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exhibition of 1915. There he met several world famous dignitaries, including his boyhood idol, William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody. He was particularly amazed at the fact that one of these dignitaries, former President Theodore Roosevelt, insisted upon meeting him.
The increasing demands on Smith eventually led to a divorce from his beloved Aimee, but now the world was calling, and he was ready to find new purposes for his skills, as well as new people to amaze and inspire.
One of those people whose life was changed by Art Smith was a young Japanese bicycle mechanic who came out to see Smith on his tour of Asia in 1917. Unable to pay admission, the young man climbed a tree to watch, and what he saw changed his life, and had a major impact upon the world of transportation. The bicycle mechanic decided to change his work focus to that of transportation using the internal combustion engine, an area that was undergoing constant refinement. Because of the inspiration of Art Smith, the refinements, modifications and improvements made to internal combustion engines by a young bicycle mechanic named Soichiro Honda became a standard that the world has become accustomed to over time as the Honda Motor Company. Think about it…the biggest employer of Marysville, Ohio, and possibly Kamco Industries of West Unity, might have never come into existence without the inspiration of Art Smith upon an impressionable Japanese bicycle mechanic in 1917.
With the United States entering World War I, Smith offered to join the American flying forces, but probably due to his 5′ 3″ stature and the laundry list of injuries from all his crashes, he was turned down. He then volunteered to teach flying, and was also a volunteer test pilot.
In 1922, Smith made a forced landing in a field near Flatrock, Michigan. The Fort Wayne flyboy met the daughter of the owner of the field, and eventually Smith proposed marriage to Ms. Garnett Straits. Everything was coming up roses for Art Smith.
In 1923, Smith found a new use for his flying skills as a pilot for the United States Postal Service, and their burgeoning transcontinental air mail service. Eventually, Smith took over the nightly run between Chicago and Bryan, giving the Fountain City the distinction of playing host to yet another pioneer of modern aviation. That distinction proved to be short lived though.
The air mail planes of the day up to that time were largely World War I surplus De Havillands and the occasional Curtiss, all of which were open cockpit planes. Although the technology had improved, flying was still a highly dangerous profession. Coming into 1926, no less than 41 postal service employees had lost their lives on the coast-to-coast airmail route. On the night of February 12, 1926, Art loaded up his Curtiss 602 Carrier Pigeon, and took off in fog and icy weather.
Due to the poor visibility aloft, Art soon lost his way. Thinking that the bright lights from cars at a farmhouse were from the landing strip at Willett Field, he descended and prepared to land. He realized his mistake too late and as he tried to bank his plane and climb, he crashed into a wooded area just outside of Montpelier. The crash caused the fuel line to rupture, resulting in the remains of the plane being engulfed in flames before it came to a full stop. Arthur Roy Smith, the Smash-up Kid for whom Smith Field in Fort Wayne is named, was killed in the crash. In a most cruel twist of fate, the accident took place on the same evening as the bridal shower of his fiancée.
The body of Art Smith was returned to his hometown Fort Wayne for a funeral befitting a hero. The streets of the Summit City were lined with admirers as the funeral procession wound its way to the Lindenwood Cemetery where, after ceremonies attended by throngs of people including the mayor, the chief of police and other dignitaries, Smith was laid to rest. A squadron of Army pilots from McCook Field in Dayton, where Smith had served as a test pilot just a few years prior, flew overhead and dropped flowers over the cemetery, a sign of high respect carried forward from the aviators of World War I.
Other than an empty field and a commemorative plaque, nothing remains of the old Willett Field in Bryan that once saw Smith landing and taking off. A monument to the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne was unveiled in Fort Wayne’s Memorial Park in 1928. It was a fitting tribute to Arthur Roy Smith, and marked the end of the early flight era in the area.
The next time you board a commercial flight for wherever, remember that a century ago, Art Smith saw you, and hundreds of thousands like you, using the highways of the sky as your means of transportation. He bewailed the development of the airplane as a machine of war, seeing something greater on the horizon. “But there are peaceful conquests for aeronautics far more valuable,” he pleaded in his 1915 autobiography. “There is a great new element to be won for the use of commerce and transportation.”
He clarified his point with prophecy, saying, “People do not realize what that means. They are fond of comparing the aeroplane to the automobile. Why limit the aeroplane by that comparison? When we have the advance in aeroplane construction which we have in machines which stay on the ground such a comparison will seem foolish. Today they are comparing a motorcycle, which makes a speed of 100 miles an hour with a 15-horse-power motor, to the aeroplane which makes only 60 miles with 80 horsepower. The time will come, with better engines, with a propeller which will give greater traction effort, when we can reach in the air a proportion between speed and power similar to that of the motorcycle. The possibilities of aerial navigation can not even be imagined now.”
He concluded his vision by saying, “The world is carried forward by man’s great dreams. The greatest dream of all is the conquest of the air. What it will mean to human life we know no more than Watt knew when he watched the lid of the kettle and dreamed of the first steam engine. Aerial navigation will mean, as the steam engine did, more than we can imagine now.
“Big men are working on it. Big men will some day conquer all the difficulties which we are fighting.
“We are only pioneers, but we are pioneers with a great idea. Some time in future centuries the whole world will be revolutionized by that idea. Then it will know the value of the hope and the thrill we feel as our aeroplanes rise from the earth, pass through the clouds, and fly high in the clear upper air.”
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