Gustave Whitehead

Gustave Albin Whitehead (born Gustav Albin Weisskopf; January 1, 1874 – October 10, 1927) is an aviation pioneer who emigrates from Germany to the United States where he designs and builds gliders, flying machines, and engines between 1897 and 1915.

Controversy surrounds published accounts and Whitehead's own claims that he flew a powered machine successfully several times in 1901 and 1902, predating the first flights by the Wright Brothers in 1903.

Much of Whitehead's reputation rests on a newspaper article which was written as an eyewitness report and describes his powered and sustained flight in Connecticut on August 14, 1901.

Over a hundred newspapers in the U.S. and around the world soon repeated information from the article.

Several local newspapers also reported on other flight experiments that Whitehead made in 1901 and subsequent years.

Whitehead's aircraft designs and experiments are described or mentioned in Scientific American articles and a 1904 book about industrial progress.

His public profile fades after about 1915, however, and he dies in relative obscurity in 1927.

In the 1930s, a magazine article and book will assert that Whitehead had made powered flights in 1901–02, and the book includes statements from people who said that they had seen various Whitehead flights decades earlier.

These published accounts trigger debate among scholars, researchers, and aviation enthusiasts, and even Orville Wright questions whether Whitehead was first in powered flight.

Mainstream historians dismiss  the Whitehead flight claims, but some later research supported them, including books printed in 1966, 1978, and 2015.

No photograph is known to exist showing Whitehead making a powered controlled flight, although reports in the early 1900s said such photos had been publicly displayed.

Researchers have studied and attempted to copy Whitehead aircraft. Since the 1980s, enthusiasts in the U.S. and Germany have built and flown versions of Whitehead's "Number 21" machine using modern engines and propellers.

No related events match the current filters.