Gustav Albin Weißkopf (Whitehead)

Gustav Albin Weißkopf was born on 1 January 1874 in Leutershausen near Ansbach. Not much is known about his early years: Both parents died when he was still a child. He was a temporary apprentice to a bookbinder and a locksmith, then landed in Hamburg on a sailing ship and probably spent several years as a sailor. He is also said to have stayed longer in Brazil. From 1894 he lived in the USA and americanized his name to "Gustave Whitehead".

In Boston he worked as an assistant to Harvard professor William Pickering. Here he met James Means, who founded the "Boston Aeronautical Society" in 1895. He wanted to build gliders in the style of Otto Lilienthal. Weißkopf was hired because he claimed to know Lilienthal and even to have worked with him (which, like so much in Weißkopf's life, cannot be proven). But he may have translated Lilienthal's writings for the Society.

In 1897 we find him in New York, where he builds his own airplanes and successfully presents them to the public and the press. A few weeks later he marries and states "aeronaut" as his job profession in his marriage certificate. He moves to Pittsburgh, where he is said to have made his first flight with a steam motor glider in 1899, which seems to have ended in a crash at a wall.

1900 he moves to Bridgeport, where he develops his aircraft no. 21, called "Condor". He designed and built both the aircraft and the engines himself. The "Condor" has two propellers powered by a 20 HP engine and a landing gear with an additional 10 HP engine for starting acceleration. This means that the No. 21 can also drive on the road when the wings are folded up.

And so in the early morning hours of August 14, 1901 (possibly?) the first engine-powered flight in history takes place - if you believe a reporter of the local weekly "Bridgeport Sunday Herald".

In order not to cause a stir, "No. 21" is rolled onto the road at midnight by Weißkopf and his two colleagues Dickie and Cellie. Then she drives under her own power to the test site, a large meadow, externer Link reports the journalist (possibly "Herald" editor-in-chief Richard Howell). There it first comes to an unmanned test flight with two sandbags as weight instead of the pilot. The engines are started, the assistants hold the aircraft with ropes. Then the No. 21 is released - and takes off: “She looked for all the world like a great white goose raising from the feeding ground in the early morning dawn”, reports the “Herald”. A timer ensures that the engines stop after a short time; the machine glides back to the ground.

Weißkopf is enthusiastic about the test. A short time later he himself takes off with the No. 21, which thus becomes the first real aircraft in history. He flies straight ahead for a few minutes, avoids a few trees by shifting his weight and lands safely again.

Whitehead became quite famous over the next few years thanks to reports of his flights. But he got involved in business with the wrong people, suffered financial shipwreck and then concentrated on building engines for aircrafts (possibly quite successfully, but this is also controversial in the literature). He seems to have made no further successful flight attempts (at least none are documented), which is an argument for Weißkopf critics to also question the flights of 1901-02.

After his engine factory goes bankrupt, Weißkopf keet his family and himself afloat as a simple factory worker. He died impoverished on 10 October 1927 at the age of 53, in Bridgeport.