Iowa’s first flight

The third week of December marks the 120th anniversary of the first controlled powered heavier than air machine flight, achieved by the Wright Brothers on Dec. 17, 1903 on the sandy shore of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

The Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, had been born to Church of the Brethren bishop Milton Wright in Indiana and Ohio respectively. But as an official of the church, Milton was assigned to the district that included Eastern Iowa. He settled with his sons, and daughter, Katharine, at Cedar Rapids in 1878.

Orville and Wilbur were first introduced to the intrigues of powered flight during this time when, as grade school students, their father presented them with a Penaud Flyer, a stick with a propeller at one end. When a string was twisted and pulled rapidly, would spin the propeller causing the toy to soar up into the air and then fall back to the ground.

Both brothers credited that gift with instilling in them a lifelong fascination for flight. The bishop relocated his family back to Dayton, Ohio after nearly four years in Cedar Rapids, where, from a bicycle shop, the brothers conceived and built their first manned flying machine.

Seven years following the Wrights’ departure from Cedar Rapids, Arthur Hartman was born at Burlington in a small residence near the Mississippi River. Adventurous as a child, at the age of 15, he left his family home to move to Chicago, where he wished to pursue a career in the fledgling field of aeronautics.

At the time, however, this consisted largely of muslin fabric coated with “dope” to make it airtight and stitching the ends of the fabric together to form a large balloon that, when filled with hydrogen, would lift up into the air. The technology was primitive, but money could be made by hosting an ascension and charging an admission fee to witness it at county fairs and other public exhibitions across the country.

One such host was the Goddard Balloon Company of the Windy City. Hartman, seeking employment in Chicago, asked for a job, expecting to serve as a mechanic. Instead, he was told the firm was in need of an aerialist. It sounded like a great position, especially for someone as young as he and with a passion for aeronautics, but then he discovered what the job would entail.

A massive balloon was inflated with hydrogen, and a trapeze, suspended by two ropes beneath the balloon, was dangled beneath it. A passenger would sit upon the trapeze, and when cables holding the balloon down were unraveled, the balloon would rise with its passenger, and at a few hundred feet up, a satchel full of advertising leaflets promoting a local real estate company, would be opened and the leaflets float down to the assembled crowd below. The passenger would then jump, with a parachute, and descend to the ground awaiting the balloon to ultimately drop back down nearby.

On Sept. 6, 1903, as the Wright brothers were preparing to set up their first flight in North Carolina, Hartman, at Wheaton, Illinois, made his first ascension as the passenger on the trapeze He became an aerialist three months before Orville and Wilbur lifted off the ground in their winged flying machine at Kitty Hawk.

Enthralled by the experience, Hartman continued to make ascensions, although later under a much larger sixty-four foot long cigar shaped balloon that had an engine and propeller attached beneath it, allowing him controlled flight, as Captain of what was called an airship. He remained infatuated, though, with the Wright brothers’ achievement of flight without an air bag, and in 1909, returned to Burlington to build his own machine.

Over a period of a few months during the winter, he assembled a crude airplane with one wingspan instead of the two in the Wright brothers design, and installed a small 18-horsepower engine to spin its propeller. Hartman would sit at the center of a truss above the plane’s two wheels and between the wings. Stretched behind him was a fuselage, at the end of which rose a vertical fin to help control steering. All together, the machine extended twenty-eight feet from wingtip to wingtip and weighed 350 pounds.

After an earlier unsuccessful attempt in April, the entire contraption was loaded in several pieces into the back of a pickup truck and brought to the city’s golf course, by the cemetery, on the west side of Burlington. The sections of the plane were then put back together, set up at the edge of the greens, and, on May 10, 1910, scantly near treetop level, Art Hartman became the first to fly a heavier than air machine in the state of Iowa.

In 1956, the Bleriot, as he called it, was sold to Harold Warp, who displayed it prominently in his collection, which is today the Pioneer Village Museum, at Minden, Nebraska. Hartman passed away, of natural causes, in October 1970, having continued flying home built aircraft well beyond his 75th birthday.

Let us remember him on this, the 120th birthday of powered controlled heavier than air flight.

David V. Wendell is a Marion historian, author and special events coordinator specializing in American history.