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OVER THE WAVES, 1910
In the pursuit of successful flight over water, Americans found an endeavor in which they could, at last, take equal honors with the
French. To Glenn Curtiss belongs the credit for being the first to build and market a machine capable of landing on and taking off from
the surface of the sea.
Yet the premier success of Curtiss was itself preceeded by the experiments of a Frenchman little
known today---Henri Fabre. After the futile experiments of Voisin and Bleriot on the river Seine in 1905 and 1906, French aviation---
indeed aviation everywhere---developed literally from the ground up, instead of from the water. Fabre, however, an inventive marine
engineer and navigator, persisted in his original research on the problem of achieving powered flight from a water base. On the Gulf of
Fos at Martigues, near Marseilles, he began a series of tests in 1909 with a weird contrivance he had put together during the course of his
studies the year before. Resembling a giant dragonfly flying backward, it consisted of a skeleton framework mounted on three
scientifically designed floats, with a 50-hp Gnome motor and Chauviere propeller at the rear. On March 28, 1910, Fabre managed to lift
his creation from the surface of the sea for the first time. He continued his flights, droning fitfully over the waves for short distances, until
May---when the apparatus suddenly took a header into the Mediterranean and was almost totally wrecked. Fabre himself was unhurt.
The machine reappeared at Monaco in 1911, during a series of aquatic races at that port; but the engine proved inadequate, and
development proceeded no further. However, Fabre's lightweight, hollow wooden floats, which gave a measure of lift in the air as well as
on the water, continued to be supplied in one form or another to hydroaeroplane manufacturers in Europe for several years to come. (A
memorial to commemorate his first flight at Martigues was dedicated in 1967 by the Russian cosmonaut Uri Gagarin---the first man to fly
into outer space.)
FromCONTACT: The Story of the Early Birds |
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