Those Magnificent Men...

It may be that on this day in 1901, in Fairfield, Connecticut, the first powered flight was accomplished - two years before the Wright brothers managed it. The man who took to the air (or not) on that day was one Gustave Whitehead (born Gustav Weisskopf), a Bavarian immigrant, and he seems to have covered a distance of nearly half a mile (much more than the Wright brothers), at an impressive height of nearly 50ft. What intrigues me still more is the account of a flight made even earlier, in Pittsburgh in 1899, in a steam-powered monoplane, with a friend stoking the boiler. This ended when the plane crashed into a building, leaving Whitehead's unfortunate chum seriously scalded and scarred for life. Steam-powered aviation - now there's a thought... Anyway, the whole question of who flew first remains riddled with controversy - you can read all about the Whitehead claims, in exhaustive detail, here.