When dealing with a person who died less than a century ago, it’s almost always a good idea to look at their family tree. Might they have left some papers, articles, diaries, memoirs or photographs? Sometimes this leads to a family member with an interest in genealogy and/or family history: asking is free, and if you’re nice about it you might occasionally even get an answer.
So, let’s look at Dr Sumter Beauregard Battey’s family tree…
Dr Sumter Beauregard Battey
Physician, surgeon, inventor, early aviation enthusiast.
b. 14 Apr 1861 (Rome, Floyd, GA)
d. 1 Feb 1934 (Manhattan, New York City, NY)
m. Dr Sarah Angie Margaret French d. 26 July 1917 (Manhattan, New York City, NY)
Bryan Mann Battey, Sr.
Rosalind Battey (1898-1914)
Bryan Mann Battey, Sr.
Worked for law firm Fraser, Myers & Manley, New York City. Became Assistant Commissioner of Patents of the U.S.
Given that the first two well-attested full-scale metal-clad airships (both by David Schwartz and industrialist Carl Berg) were in Russia and Prussia in the 1890s, it should be no great surprise if an American concern built its own similar airship at about the same time.
But entrepreneurs are opportunists; opportunity needs timing; and timing is everything. So what was it about the 1890s and airships? Why was the timing so special?
Affordable Aluminium
In my first post that touched on the 1897 Airship “Flap”, I mentioned that aluminium was the wonder-metal of the second half of the 19th century: but, to be fair, that wasn’t quite the whole story. Though I was correct to say that aluminium had gone into industrial production in 1856, it stayed horribly expensive for decades.
In fact, it wasn’t until 1886 when chemist Charles Martin Hall and his sister Julia discovered (while experimenting “in a shed attached to the family home in Oberlin, Ohio”) how to produce aluminium much more cheaply via electrolysis. The French chemist Paul T. Héroult discovered the same process at around the same time. Ever since, aluminium production has been dominated by the Hall-Héroult Process.
To exploit this new industrial process, Hall initially tried to get backing from investors in Ohio and New York, but without success. Eventually Hall succeeding in bringing together a group of backers including Captain Alfred E. Hunt (a metallurgist whose independent lab served the steel industry) and Arthur Vining Davis; who all on Thanksgiving Day 1888 founded a company called the Pittsburgh Reduction Company.
By 1890, the company had already received an initial investment from the famous Pittsburgh banking family the Mellons: in fact, the Mellons’ shareholding later grew to a third of the whole stock.
By 1891, the company had moved from a pilot site on Smallman Street to much bigger premises in New Kensington, where it started to form aluminium ingots and prefabricated products; and by 1895, it was producing aluminum cookware (such as rust-free kettles). Aluminium frames for bicycles were another big growth area during the 1890s.
Flying machines subsequently proved a focus as well: in 1903, the Wright Brothers’ engine block and crankcase were both made of Pittsburgh Reduction Company aluminium. The company’s aerospace alloy 2017-T4 (developed in 1916) was used for the US Navy’s rigid airship USS Shenandoah.
In 1925, the company listed on the New York Curb Exchange as “Aluminum Company of America”: but you probably have seen the shortened form of its name, still thriving a century later – Alcoa.
Pittsburgh Reduction Company in 1896
For any company or concern in the US looking to make an aluminium airship gondola in 1896 (in time for the airship “flap” in 1897), I think the Pittsburgh Reduction Company was highly likely to have been its supplier. A 290-page book published by the PRC in 1898 (“Aluminum and aluminum alloys in the form of ingots, castings, bars, plates [etc.] (Myers & Shinkle co., printers, 1898)”) describes (in, ummm, riveting detail) just about every aspect (and industrial use) imaginable of aluminium and various aluminium alloys.
If an early customer had – as I suspect – bought a sizeable amount of aluminium from the Pittsburgh Reduction Company in 1896, I think there’s a good chance that a trace of that 1896 transaction remains in the 98 linear feet (191 boxes) of company archives that still exist. These are held by the Heinz History Center, located at 1212 Smallman St, Pittsburgh: “Aluminum Company of America Records, 1857-1992 (bulk 1900-1965), MSS #282, Detre Library and Archives, Heinz History Center“.
Personally, the two sections I’d be most interested in:
A full account of how Walter McCann came to take two photographs of the mysterious airship appeared in the Chicago Times-Herald on Monday, April 12, 1897. The text of that article is helpfully reproduced in a Tripod website (from 2006) and on Patrick Gross’s website. The second (much better) photograph itself was reproduced by one of the Times-Herald’s etchers (pen and ink artist), who tried to make as good a copy as he could for printing on the front page.
But who was Walter McCann, and might a print of his original photograph (which he didn’t want to sell the negative of to any newspaper) still be in existence?
Walter McCann’s newsstand
The address of McCann’s newsstand was described in the article as “on Greenleaf Avenue”, “near the Northwestern Railway tracks”: according to a list the Chicago Eagle printed every month or so, it was 4340 E. Ravenswood Park. He lived in “Rogers Park”, and (in 1897) had a son, who had “won a camera not long ago in a contest for getting subscribers to a paper”. Nowadays, the shop on the corner of N. Ravenswood Avenue and W. Greenleaf Avenue in Rogers Park (and still right next to the railway line, though that is now elevated) is “Bark Place” (a pet daycare centre).
McCann saw the strange object “coming from the south” at about 5.30am, went inside to get his son’s camera, then “ran to Greenleaf Avenue and Market Street”. A quick look at Tillotson’s pocket map and street map of Chicago for 1900 reveals that Market Street was the old name for E. Ravenswood Park. Additionally, McCann’s newsstand appears to have been right next to where Rogers’ Park Station was.
Hence I think we can almost exactly place where the photograph of the airship was taken. I believe the the row of connected dots down the next road East marks the row of overhead cables (electricity poles? telephone poles?) that appear in the background in the image. Though I must confess that I don’t quite understand why the railway tracks in the image appear to curve off to the right when the railway tracks on the pocket map around Rogers’ Park Station appear to be perfectly straight.
Walter R McCann’s family tree
Familysearch.org suggests a Walter Raymond McCann, which (though not a 100% certain match) does seem pretty good. A quick spin round myheritage.com (where I still have a couple of months of subscription left) and familysearch.org yielded a quick family tree (though I’m less sure about the section in italics):
Born 17 April 1860 (Paris, Bourbon KY) to Charles McCann and Harriet Current (one of six siblings)
1900 living in Chicago, Cook IL
Died 21 October 1928 (Chicago, Cook IL)
8 May 1884 married Hannah Theodora Wright (1864-1959) in Toledo, Lucas OH
William Ray McCann (1885-1974)
11 Jan 1913 married Mildred Olive Bates, Ancon, Panama Canal Zone
Frank Bates McCann (1915-2003)
10 Dec 1938 married Virginia Elliott Newcomb (1915-1991), Hilton, Monroe NY
Walter Ray McCann (1916-1997)
21 Sep 1945 married Katharine Duvall James (1909-1996), Allegheny PA
Patrick Keith McCann (1950-2002)
19 May 1978 married Debra R Reel, in San Joaquin CA
Adriana McCann (1921-2003)
Robert Lee McCann (1887-1976)
3 Jan 1907 married Evelyn Thompson (1888-1948)
Florence Evelyn McCann (1908-2006)
Married George John Kruchten (1902-1990)
Robert Kruchten
Married Marian
Robert
Married Laurie
Patrick
Married Amy
Glenn
Married Alison
Walter Lee McCann (1911-1967)
Married Violet
John
James
Arlene
Catherine
Jeanette Ellen McCann (1923-2000)
Married Philip H Horwitz (1920-2005)
Doubtless Walter McCann had many more descendants not included here. I wonder if one or more of them have online family trees, and a family memory of the two day period in April 1897 when Walter McCann and his son’s camera were the toast of Rogers Park?
Following on from my last post on metal-clad airships, I thought I ought to look a little more closely at Dr Sumter Beauregard Battey of New York and his nitro-glycerine-pellet-powered airship design.
Dr Sumter Beauregard Battey
As is so often the case, his obituary in the New York Times (included on his findagrave.com page) is a good place to start (2 Feb 1934):
Sumter B. Battey, physician and surgeon, died yesterday at his home, 700 West 179th Street, after a brief illness of heart disease with complications.
Surviving are his second wife, Mrs. Edith Carter Battey, and a son of the first marriage, Bryan Mann Battey, of the law firm Fraser, Myers & Manley, New York City. His first wife, who died in 1917, was Dr. Sarah A. French at their marriage in 1895.
Dr Battey, son of William Henry and Frances Whatley Battey, was born seventy-two years ago on one of the family plantations at Louisville, Ga. Hew was graduated from the University of Georgia Medical College in 1885. After a period of post-graduate work he settled in New York City.
Apart from professional activities, Dr Battey was known for his attainments in the field of invention. He made several important technical contributions in the mechanical arts.
Among the ancestors of Dr. Sumter Battery were Caleb Carr, first Colonial Governor of Rhode Island, and General Stephen Heard, Governor of Georgia during the Revolution. William Henry Battey, father of Dr. Battey, was killed in the Battle of Antietam while leading his men, known as the “Battey Guards”.
Inventions
As well as the electric bicycle and airship mentioned in the previous post, Battey also invented a lighter, a liquid self-igniting device, a razor stropping device, a railway track switching mechanism, a hair waving or curling device, a “repeating mechanism for talking machines”, and a number of sewing machine-related patents. He also had a sewing machine company in East Orange, NJ, as reported in the Sewing Machine Times of 25 June 1905 (though this was voided in 1910 “for nonpayment of taxes”):
In New Jersey: The Battey Self-threading Sewing Machine Company, of 30 Halsted street, East Orange, formed to make and sell all kinds of machines and to deal in patents and inventions, and to operate plans of all kinds. The authorized capital stock is $120,000, of which $1,000 has been paid in. The incorporators are S. B. Battey and W[ade] Hampton de Fontaine, of New York, and Alfred Miller of Chicago.
The invention preceding Battey’s airship seems to have been for “The Lighting of High Gas Jets”, as reported on the 14 Dec 1889 issue of the Australian Town and Country Journal (Sydney NSW):
A new device for conveniently lighting gas jets placed above ordinary reach, as in halls, has been invented by S. Battey, of New York City. The method of lighting is by means of little percussion caps. Those pellets are held in a tube, and are fed, one at a time as required, to a cylinder which has an opening opposite the tip of the burner. After the gas has been turned on, the caps are forced up and ignited in front of the jet by a piston which is set in motion through the medium of a spring which is operated upon at the time the gas key is turned by the person using the apparatus.
Battey’s Airship in Scientific American
An article in bleedingcool.com mentions Sumter Battey in passing, because the writer is taken by the idea that the the flying machine behind the 1897 airship flap was in fact built by Moses S. Cole. However, I thought the whole paragraph was noteworthy, because it gives an insight into Battey’s patent agents:
It’s no random happenstance that an artist’s depiction of Cole’s patent in action was featured on the cover of Scientific American. as he filed his patent via that periodical’s publisher. Scientific American‘s publisher, Munn & Co., was also a patent agent, and patents filed through Munn & Co. were often featured in the magazine. In addition to Cole’s cover feature in 1887, other airship patents that the company helped file and then publicized in Scientific American during this era include Sumter Beauregard Battey’s Aerial Machine in 1892 and Herman A. J. Rieckert’s “improved airship” in 1889.
The Scientific American article on “Battey’s Aerial Ship” included a rather natty-looking depiction:
I think it’s worth including the text in full:
The principal feature of the means of aerial navigation shown in the picture consists in the method of propulsion employed, the power for this purpose being affords by discharges of small and readily regulated quantities of a high explosive, of which a very considerable amount can be carried without adding greatly to the weight of the whole apparatus. The balloon portion of this air ship is of a cigar-shaped module, having a framework of aluminum, covered with oiled silk of other suitable fabric, or with a thin envelope of aluminum, and is of sufficient size to afford, when filled with a light gas, a lifting power corresponding with the weight of the car and the load it is proposed to carry, all of the apparatus and fittings being of the lightest possible construction consistent with the necessary strength. At each side of the body are wings or side planes, to guide the ship up or down, according to the inclination given them, these vanes turning on a horizontal axis, consisting of an aluminum tube extending through the center of the body. As seen in the broken-away portion of the car shown in the main view, wire ropes or cables from these side vanes extend over pulleys with gear wheel connections within the car, so that the operator, by the movement of a lever, can regulate to a nicety the inclination of the vanes.
The propelling apparatus, in which the main novelty of this invention lies, is supported upon a hinged arm at the rear. It consists, practically, of a horizontally arranged mortar-like tube, forming the end of the arm, and above this tube, as shown in more detail in the small view, is a tubular magazine containing globular or pellet-like charges of a high explosive, with the mechanism for regulating their supply to the discharge tube. The explosions, as they take place in this tube, exert a powerful backward pressure upon the air, which may be more or less continuous, according to the power to be applied to propulsion and the rate of speed sought to be attained, an air cushion back of the explosive chamber protecting the machine from shock. The rate of discharge may be controlled through a wire extending to within easy reach of the operator within the car, while light wire cables extend from the discharge tube over pulleys to a gear wheel steering apparatus in the car, the arrangement being such that the tube may be readily swung to one side or to the other as desired, the direction of the ship in the air being thus conveniently controlled. The discharge tube thus at the same time supplies the motive force and constitutes the rudder. The charges are fed automatically to the point discharge, the pellets dropping into a shallow cup or basin, which is made by the contact to complete an electric circuit, whereby the firing is effected, each pellet completing the circuit for its own explosion and at once breaking the circuit.
It is the belief of the inventor that with one of these machines, possessing a minimum of weight, owing to the absence of machinery and the use of aluminum instead of iron or steel for the framework and all the working parts, and provided with the maximum of power, due to the nature of the force employed, a speed can be attained excelling even that of bird flight. The car may be gradually reduced in fore width and aft to a sharp vertical edge at each end, offering the least possible resistance to motion, and it is suspended by aluminum wires and cords from the entire length of the body. It is designed also that machines of this type may be used for carrying freight and for regular passenger service, and their value will be obvious for such purposes as military observations, carrying of mails and dispatches, etc. This new air ship has been presented in the United States and the principal European countries by Dr S. B. Battey, of No. 39 West Twenty-seventh Street, New York City.
Though Battey’s airship was arguably the first genuine attempt at making a rocket-powered aircraft, by 1918 the Bridgeport Times and Evening Farmer was poking fun at it for using nitroglycerine for its motive power (though laughing even harder at Edwin Pynchon of Chicago, who powered his airship with dynamite).
Finally, I should briefly mention Jules Verne’s 1886 novel “Robur the Conqueror” (which was broadly adapted into a 1961 film with Vincent Price). There, the main protagonist is a megalomaniac inventor called Robur who builds a heavier-than-air battery-powered aircraft on his secret X island, takes over the meeting of the Weldon Institute (a fictional Lighter-Than-Air society in Philadelphia) and kidnaps its president to try to show them the error of their balloon-based ways, with hilarious consequences.
What Verne was tapping into (some 40 years before the Wright Brothers) was the broadly-held cultural anticipation of powered flight, along with a whole bunch of mad scientist tropes. Ultimately, what Robur conquered was the air: Sumter Battey was merely one of a whole generation of ingenious mechanics who saw no reason to wait for a Robur to turn up to do the same.
Though the whole idea of metal-clad airships sounds like a steampunk fantasy, they were in fact completely real – the US Navy famously commissioned one (the ZMC-2), and plenty of people tried (and indeed even to the present day continue to try) to build others. And the wonder-stuff that made them possible was that marvellously lightweight metal aluminium.
Here’s my brief guide to the whole genre, plus my thoughts on the 1897 Airship “flap”…
Francesco Lana de Terzi
Historically, the first glimmering of metal-clad LTA (Lighter-Than-Air) flight came circa 1670 (according to Wikipedia) from Francesco Lana de Terzi. He theorised that evacuated metal spheres could provide sufficient lift to float an airship. In reality, if he had built such rigid metal spheres, they would have collapsed under air pressure, but to be fair this was a decent first attempt. And the diagram was cool.
David Schwarz’s Two Airships
By the late 19th Century, materials and technologies had advanced so much that metal airships started to become a genuine possibility. In the 1880s, both the Russian rocket theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and self-taught Croatian engineer David Schwarz realised that a technological sweet spot had opened up. This was building an airship using aluminium (which had been first announced in 1825, and put into industrial production in 1856) and hydrogen (the first hydrogen-filled balloon had flown in 1783).
In 1893, Schwarz produced a test airship for the Russian Army (funded by industrialist Carl Berg) in St Petersburg. The Russian engineer Kowanko pointed out (rightly) that the design’s lack of a ballonet (an extra air bag inside the frame, used to control buoyancy, particularly at take-off) would put a great deal of strain during take-off and landing. And this is indeed what happened – the whole framework collapsed during inflation.
In 1895-7, Schwartz and Berg then built a second airship (this time for the Royal Prussian Government) at the Tempelhof field in Berlin. A test flight in October 1896 was unsuccessful because the hydrogen supplied had been insufficiently purified (and hence provided too little lift). Sadly, Schwartz died (in June 1896, aged 44) before his second metal airship was actually launched: the maiden flight was on 3rd November 1897.
Unfortunately, largely because of structural defects, the airship got no higher than 130m before a combination of problems brought it crashing down, damaging it beyond repair. But… it definitely did fly.
As an aside, Count von Zeppelin later bought all the aluminium used in the ship to reuse in his own (non-metal-skin) zeppelins: the legal agreement he had to sign to do this later gave rise to the myth that he had bought the design rights (which wasn’t true at all).
The 1897 Airship “Flap”
The (ever entertaining, but more than occasionally unreliable) journalist John Keel once wrote a book called “Operation Trojan Horse”. This described a long series of sightings in many US states of a strange airship, almost always travelling by night. This is now generally known as the 1896-1897 airship flap. Keel was convinced that it was, ummm, aliens wot dun it: but given that the descriptions of the people involved tend to be beardy and gentlemanly, this does seem a bit of a stretch.
For example, one contemporary press report gave the names of two men on board the mysterious airship as “S. E. Tillman and A. E. Dolbar”, working for “certain capitalists of New York”. Busby thinks these are Professor Amos Emerson Dolbear and Captain Samuel Escu Tillman; and speculates that the New York capitalists could well have included (gasp) William Randolph Hearst.
Interestingly, a photograph allegedly of the airship taken by a Walter McCann was printed on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, April 12 1897, and also in the Chicago Times-Herald (which I found here):
Might these have been sightings of a metal-clad airship?
C. A. Smith of San Francisco
Matt Novak’s Paleofuture blog mentioned a 1st September 1896 article in the San Francisco Call, reporting that a “Dr C. A. Smith of San Francisco” had a zinc model on display in Market Street of the aluminium & hydrogen airship he hoped to get funding to build. This model had “two wings like those of a beetle” which raised and fell every hundred turns of the airship’s main propeller, along with windows and a door. [Michael Busby’s chapter 19 also includes a 25th November 1896 interview with Smith in the San Francisco Call.]
Some of the observers of the airship reported widely in the 1896-1897 Texas “flap” (see for more about this) described an object having wings “something like that of a bat”. Curiously, C. A. Smith’s 1895 patent includes this drawing, including a distinctive pair of arched bat-like wings pivoted on each side:
At the end of his book, Busby has little doubt that what was seen flying at night in Texas and elsewhere during 1897 was [spoiler alert] C. A. Smith’s airship, just as Smith had promised in 1896. Busby further speculates that Smith (working in California) may have been a member of Charles Dellschau’s mysterious (and possibly hallucinatory) Sonora Aero Club (here’s a link to a nice story about Dellschau in The Atlantic). But… that’s just Busby’s guess, as far as I can tell.
Sumter B. Battey
Still, when a young C. G. Williams (according to a letter in the Dallas Morning News, April 19 1897) allegedly got to speak with the beardy gentleman flying the airship in Texas, the man claimed to have been developing it for many years “at a little town in the interior of New York state”.
C. E. Hite of Philadelphia, John S. Praul of the same city, J. S. Cowden of Virginia, Carl Erickson, Dr C. A. Smith of San Francisco, and Sumter B. Battey of New York. […] Mr Battey’s idea, for instance, consisted of a cigar-shaped balloon of thin aluminium, assisted by wings for upward or downward flight ; the whole thing to be propelled by a series of explosions. At the rear end was a sort of cup opening outward. Into this pellets of nitro-glycerine were to be dropped and exploded at the rate of six a minute, and the ship was to be propelled by the shocks. Mr Battey’s idea is still on the market. Mr Praul’s machine was to have been made of nickel steel and aluminium throughout, including the cylinder or balloon. [p. 429]
For me, the one oddly distinguishing feature of the airship(s) described in almost all accounts of the 1897 flap was a bright light, much like an electric arc light on the front of the train. So, my own tentative theory – for what it’s worth, and I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere else – is that what observers took to be a bright light may well have instead been the parabolic dish at the back of the airship that was so distinctive of Battey’s patented propulsion system.
Might Battey’s airship have been the source of the 1897 flap? Though I don’t know so, I think so: if ever there was a nice candidate for a Secret History documentary, this is surely it. My inbox awaits offers from the History Channel etc.
Incidentally, Battey’s address in 1918 (when his son Lieutenant Bryan Mann Battey was reported as missing in action) was “700 West One hundred and seventy-ninth street, New York, NY”, he lived 1861-1934, and his partner was Sarah Angie French. Battey isn’t mentioned in Tom Crouch’s “The Eagle Aloft”, or indeed in any airship history I’ve seen, but perhaps there’s a secret history of airships discussing Battey that I’ve yet to see. Though “Dr S. B. Battey” was a member of the Aeronautic Society of New York, and gave a talk (in 1908?) on wings on dirigibles, please let me know if you see him mentioned anywhere.
Thomas B. Slate’s “City of Glendale”
The 1920s brought a new wave of interest in making metal-clad airships not just possible, but commercially viable. Perhaps most notably, in 1921 Carl B. Fritsche founded the Metalclad Airship Corporation of Detroit (“MAC”), the company that built (as I’ll cover in a separate blog post) the ZMC-2.
But MAC was far from alone. The August 1940 edition of Flying Magazine included an article by J. Gordon Vaeth called “The Blimp Business“, which described a number of other companies who had tried to build metal-clad airships in the 1920s and 1930s.
Thomas B. Slate started up the American Mechanical Engineering Company (an “outgrowth of the Slate Aircraft Corporation”), which in 1928 built an all-metal airship called the “City of Glendale” (“in honor of the city in which it was built” [p.38]).
Though it flew tethered (i.e. as a captive balloon), the Great Depression prevented it from being finished and used commercially: and it was eventually destroyed in 1931. Gordon Vaeth’s description seems to betray a sad fondness for this airship, in that it had a beautifully simple and robust design that could be easily replicated, but that its commercial timing was catastrophically bad.
Carl B. Fritsche and Ralph Upson: the ZMC-2
The history of the ZMC-2 is a huge topic, and this post has already overrun my original target by a factor of 2x or more. So please don’t be cross with me for postponing this to a later date!
National Airship Association of California & Inter-Ocean Dirigible Corporation
Finally, Vaeth’s 1940 article mentions two other companies trying to build radical new metal-clad airships at his time of writing. The first was an all-metal airship designed by Thad Rose for the National Airship Association of California, that had “a prototype under construction”. This contained a clever central tube running down the middle of the airship, creating a vacuum at the front of the ship, pulling it forward. A Russian website I found points to a large article in the April 6, 1939 Los Angeles Times (which I haven’t yet seen), plus a screen-grab of Rose’s 1930 patent. You can see the distinctive power tube running down the centre:
The second was the Inter-Ocean Dirigible Company, which was a Virginia-based company that grew out of the Virginia Airship Company. This, too, incorporated a central (internal) power tube running from end to end: special nozzles at the inlet and outlet of the power tube “enable[d] control of the ship in any direction”. Sadly, I haven’t yet found a patent drawing or picture of this particular airship; but there’s a good chance that it was never actually built.
Your Thoughts, Nick?
The neat-and-tidy Wikipedia page on metal-clad airships is all very well, but I do suspect the succession of airships described above points to a much more interesting history. And who knows, perhaps this will also include the secret history of the 1897 airship flap?
