The Sky Watchers

 

Once upon a time
the only practical reasons a person might study the sky
would be to watch for dark clouds and mark the direction of the wind,
estimate the time of daybreak or high noon,
and occasionally notice any seasonal flights of geese.

Then beginning in 1908
people began turning their gaze upward
as it seemed the sky would soon be filled
with flying machines.
Everyone was talking about reports
of majestic balloons, gigantic airships,
and flimsy aeroplanes
buzzing around overhead.

It sounded like an outlandish tale.
It made you want to witness
such a fantastic invention for yourself,
or at least see a picture of it.

 

 

 

Soon these aeronautical contraptions
became quite a distraction
as they transformed the world
from two dimensions to three. 

Directions were no longer limited
to the points of a compass.
Now everyone had to contend
with up and down too.

The age of aviation had begun.

 

 

The Wright brothers sent their first airplane to France in the summer of 1908 where Wilbur Wright gave the first public exhibition of their aircraft on August 8th at the Hunaudières horse racing track in Le Mans, France. Using a catapult type mechanism to launch their Wright Flyer off a wooden track, Wilbur took to the air and flew around the track at an altitude of 30-35 feet before landing near where he started. The flight lasted just 1 minute 45 seconds. Thousands of people had turned out, most expecting a failure or worse. Instead skepticism was replaced by astonishment. The Wright Flyer became the wonder of a new age.

 

The following summer Orville Wright took their new model aeroplane to Germany and gave 19 demonstration flights in Berlin, first to the German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II and military officials, and later to the public. Germany had already claimed dominion of the air with Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin's airships which first flew in 1900. So while in Germany, Zeppelin graciously invited Orville to Frankfurt for a ride in his new dirigible, Zeppelin LZ 6 on a 50-mile trip from Frankfort to Mannheim. The flight was probably considerably higher than Orville had ever taken his airplane. This postcard commemorates that event with a picture of Zeppelin's dirigible, the Wright airplane, and a small balloon flying above the city's main park. Looking like a balloon himself is a vignette of Graf von Zeppelin in the corner.

The aircraft were all cleverly drawn onto a photo, and as far as I know, Orville never flew his airplane in Frankfurt. The postcard was sent from Frankfurt on 23 September 1909 just a few days after Orville's visit. While in Berlin Orville set several new flying records. On 17 September 1909 his airplane attained an altitude of 565 feet at the Tempelof airfield and was aloft for 54 minutes 34 seconds. The next day he took a passenger up for a flight that lasted one hour and 35 minutes. 

 

 

 

 

The Wright brothers' ambition was to secure government contracts with the military of each country they visited. By the end of 1909 they had licensed their airplane design to companies in France, England, Germany, and the United States. Meanwhile several other aviation pioneers were in a rush to  demonstrate their own aeroplanes. 

 

 

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The Germans were not the only nation with airships. France also developed several lighter-than-air dirigibles. In this French postcard we can see a large crowd of people gathered shoulder to shoulder to watch a military parade where an airship and a biplane are flying above the field. A caption reads: Revue du 14 Juillet à Longchamps, Dirigeable et aéroplane évoluant au-dessus des Troupes ~ Review on 14 July at Longchamps, Airship and airplane hovering above troops. Longchamps is a horse racing track in Paris and was used to demonstrate several early aircraft.

 

The two aircraft are silhouetted against an open sky and look very grainy but realistic, so I can't be certain they were in the original image. Since most of the people direct their attention in the direction of the dirigible, I think that might be real, while the aeroplane, a Wright design, was drawn in by the postcard publisher. The French postmark is on the front of the card and is partly obscured. I think it has a date of 16.10.12 or 16 October 1912. By coincidence it was sent to someone in Le Mans who might very well have seen Wilbur Wright's historic flight in 1908.  

 

Sadly Wilbur died earlier that spring at the Wright family home in Dayton, Ohio on 30 May 1912 having succumbed at age 45 to typhoid fever. His health had been under severe stress dealing with several patent lawsuits as the brothers struggled to protect their design from competitors, both foreign and American.

 

 

 

 

 

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In this next photo postcard several men are looking skyward, apparently at two aeroplanes. Both are actually crude drawings added to the picture. One is a single wing monoplane and the other is the distinctive Wright biplane. In the background is an immense barn-like building with gigantic doors. It is a hanger for a Zeppelin airship. In the upper corner is a printed caption: Hamburger Fliegerwoche ~ Hamburg flying week. Another souvenir of an aviation exhibition. 

The postcard has a postmark from Hamburg of 7 February 1913. The military potential of aviation, especially heavier-than-air machines like the Wright Flyer, was not immediately recognized. Military planners and government officials were initially cautious about investing in this unproven technology, so it took many more successful demonstrations before both dirigibles and aeroplanes were granted development funding. In the following year that would all change.

 

 

 

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After the Wright brother's flights in 1908 the public's enthusiastic response to aviation sparked a huge variety of silly novelty postcards. This one is a colorful photo montage depicting a kind of holiday inn with numerous groups of people doing things near a lake or river. In the sky is a biplane, a dirigible, and a strange balloon shaped like a Zeppelin airship but with a gondola attached that has half-a-dozen merrymakers waving to the folk below. There's also an automobile and a motorboat conveying more people joining the recreation. Extra points if you can spot the musical ensembles. There's more than one.

There is no caption identifying this farcical place, but the partly hidden postmark was sent from somewhere in Germany on 29 September 1913.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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My final postcard of sky watchers is a bird's-eye-view painting of a grand royal palace with a dirigible and two aeroplanes cavorting among the clouds in a sunny blue sky. The scene is of the Schönbrunn Palace, the celebrated summer residence of Austria's Habsburg rulers, located in Hietzing, Vienna. The Austrian coat of arms with its double-headed eagle decorates the pictures frame.  Captions at top and bottom of the card, written in Czech and Latin, read:

 

 Pro rakouske vzducholoďstvo
~
For the Austrian Air Force

 

Viribus Unitis ~ With United Forces

 

This card is clearly intended to highlight the aircraft in way that is more intentional than the novelty flying machines pictured in my previous postcards. In fact this connection to an "Air Force" is a royal  appeal for donations to the defense of the fatherland. It was sent from Wien on 22 October 1915 during the second year of the Great War of 1914-1918.

 

 

 

The back of the postcard has a message space and another caption written in Czech. 

 

Arcivévoda Karel
obraci se k národúm Rakouska s prosbou
Każdy rac zakoupenum této dopisnice
prispěti svou hřivnou ke zbudováni
rakouského vzducholod'stova.

Čistý výtěžek plyne ve prospěch
rakouského vzducholod'stova

~

Archduke Charles
ppeals to the nations of Austria
with a request that every time you purchase this postcard,
you will contribute your money to the construction
of the Austrian air force.

The net proceeds go to the Austrian Air Force

Archduke Karl's full name was Karl Franz Josef Ludwig Hubert Georg Otto Maria, but beginning in November 1916 after the death of his grand uncle, Franz Joseph I (1830–1916), whose face is on the postcard's 10 Heller stamp, he became known as  Charles I, (1887–1922) the last Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. 

 

Though Austria was never as advanced in industry and technology as its neighbor and ally Germany, it still had a formidable military power in 1914 since the Austria-Hungary empire covered a vast area of central Europe. The first Austrian Air Force was set up as special military unit for conducting field observation in balloons. When aeroplanes were improved in the first years of the war, they were mainly used in the same way, flying high enough for pilots to observe an enemy's troop actions and deployments. The concept of using planes for aerial bombing was still at a very experimental level.

 

It's hard to learn how much money was raised for the air force from sales of this postcard. I suspect even in the early years of the war, when Austria was fighting Russia in the east and Italy and Serbia in the south, its armed forces were so very overstretched in supplies and materiel that an air force got very little government support. But what I like about this picture of the Schönbrunn Palace is how pastoral it looks compared to other wartime propaganda postcards.

 

 

Though it is an old cliche, "A picture is worth a thousand words", I think it was best applied in the early years of aviation when few people could understand the complex physics and challenging engineering problems that these early aviation pioneers faced. Each advance in making a flying machine led to more complications that had to be solved. Teams of inventors, mechanics, and scientists were needed to improve engine power, navigation, aeronautical stability, and above all safety.

Yet what these postcards also demonstate is the power of imagination. Until people could see an airship or aeroplane, they had no context to define that third dimension of up and down which aviation brings. These images convey that sense of wonder and amazement that Orville and Wibur Wright's machine gave the world. The sky now had no limit. Mankind could fly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have two videos to share for this story.
The first is colorized historic film of the Wright brothers' flyer
when it was demonstrated in 1908
for the U. S. Army at Fort Meyer, Virginia.
(The music accompaniment is also fitting as it is a personal favorite,
Robert Schumann's Adagio and Allegro for Horn and Piano.)

  

The next video is from the same YouTube channel,
Nineteenth century videos. Back to life
which has numerous historic films
that have been carefully and beautifully restored.
This film footage shows a 1910 air race between two aeroplanes
flying at night between London and Manchester.

 

 

 

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday
where everyone flies in first class.