Taking Flight

I grabbed this photo from the society's history timeline. Forgive me please, NHHS!

I wrote almost 70 of these "timeline entries" to populate a timeline of state history on the New Hampshire Historical Society's website, following a structure dictated by the society. I enjoyed the challenge creating a story that flowed through the sequence of sections.

TITLE

1910-1911 The first airplanes flown in New Hampshire (by Arch Hoxsey and Harry Atwood) provided demonstrations at fairs and transportation for special events

WHEN & WHAT

On Sept. 27, 1910—less than seven years after the Wright brothers made the first-ever powered airplane flight at Kitty Hawk—a daring young man named Arch Hoxsey attempted to take to the air before the largest crowd to ever attend the Rochester Fair. He had been paid an extraordinary appearance fee of $5,000. The air was calm. It took two tries. But on the second, Hoxsey became the first person to fly an airplane in New Hampshire. “His machine was under perfect control and the crowds went crazy over it,” reported the Rochester Courier. On June 19 of the next year, a second daring young man, Harry Atwood, became the first person to fly into the state, highlighting a day that began in Saugus, Massachusetts. Atwood made a series of short hops, each carrying a different journalist, all intended to promote the experience of powered flight. “Ain’t this awful?” he shouted to one passenger as his fragile plane, buffeted by winds, “shook and wavered like a piece of tissue paper in a breeze.” By day’s end he had reached Concord, where he circled the State House dome twice. The next day, having set out for Tilton en route to Laconia, he was blown off course and forced to land in Pittsfield. “God only knows how we will get down,” he confessed to his passenger at one point. “We are rising because I can’t help it.” 

WHO

Hoxsey and Atwood were both taught to fly by the Wright brothers. Hoxsey was born in 1883 in Illinois, learned to fly in March 1910, and followed his triumph in Rochester by taking Teddy Roosevelt aloft for four minutes in October, making Roosevelt the first former president to fly. Atwood, who was also born in 1883, grew up in Boston and dropped out of MIT to work in a car garage. He became infatuated with flying while attending the second-ever American aviation meet, held in Boston in September 1910, at which President Taft awarded a $10,000 prize to an English aviator who flew to Boston Lighthouse and back 33 times. Having sold two electric meters he had invented to General Electric, Atwood used the money to finance his training as an aviator. Among his fellow students at the Wright brothers’ flying school was Henry “Hap” Arnold, who would lead the American air force in World War II. Atwood was such an earnest student that his classmates tricked him into balancing on a plank with wheels, then painting a white line the length of a field so he’d know exactly where to land. After graduating with two hours of flying experience, Atwood was hired by a Boston yacht maker, Starling Burgess, who licensed a Wright brothers’ design and began the first mass production of American airplanes.

WHERE

Burgess hired Atwood to lead his flying school, but exhibition flights such as Hoxsey’s in Rochester proved much more lucrative—and alluring. Atwood had only been flying for three weeks when he made his first foray into New Hampshire, which brought him to Nashua, Manchester, and Concord on his first day. After his forced landing in Pittsfield, his airplane was taken to Concord, where his mechanic soon crashed it. Of the two pioneering flyers, Atwood would spend far more time airborne over New Hampshire. In 1912, he flew at a fair in Colebrook on the Fourth of July, and followed that with exhibition flights over Lake Winnipesaukee later the same month. Although his airplane—a Model F Burgess-Wright seaplane—looks to the modern eye like an elaborate, flimsy kite, one onlooker described it as rising from the lake “as gracefully and easily as a swan.” He charged passengers $25 a flight and flew at about 40 mph. The last of his exhibition flights there was witnessed by 7,000 spectators.

WHY

Powered flight was the latest and seemingly most spectacular innovation in what was a half-century of stunning technological change. “Among those who witnessed our first aviator’s flight were a few who saw the first locomotive come puffing into town in September of 1848,” noted the Concord Monitor. “There were many in the crowd who remembered the first bicycle and the first trolley car; while the first automobile was within the experience of all save the youngest.” It took courage to go aloft. The science of flight was as yet poorly understood. A pilot controlled the plane by tugging control sticks attached to wires that twisted the wings. There were no seat belts; corduroy fabric glued to the wooden seats created friction to help hold pilot and passenger in place. The first flying fatality occurred in 1908; by 1911, 100 had been killed.

IMPACT

Hoxsey did not survive his first year of flying. He died on Dec. 31, 1910, while attempting to set an altitude record over Los Angeles. Atwood became one of the most famous early aviators. In July 1911, just a month after his first flights in New Hampshire, he completed a record-setting, 568-mile trip from Boston to Washington, D.C., surviving three crashes and one forced landing en route. After he landed on the White House lawn, President Taft awarded him a gold medal. In August, he flew 1,256 miles from St. Louis to New York in 11 hops. Unlike many pioneering aviators, Atwood lived a long life. He died on July 14, 1967, on the 56th anniversary of his landing on the White House lawn. He was something of a rogue, married five times, and in the words of one biographer, spent “most of his life as an eccentric and unsuccessful inventor.”

LEARN MORE

Mansfield, Howard. Skylark: The Life, Lies, and Inventions of Harry Atwood. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999.

Rice, Jane. “Early Birds of New Hampshire” in Bob Fogg and New Hampshire’s Golden Age of Aviation, 1-13. Portsmouth, NH: Peter E. Randall Publisher, 2012.

The American Heritage History of Flight by the editors of American Heritage. New York: Simon Schuster, 1962.

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