After my last post, I went looking for a source for the 1896 Airship Flap that concentrated specifically on the reports of flying machines and strange lights in the California sky in late 1896. Specifically, I wanted to know whether there was anything particular about the California sightings that might differentiate the 1896 Airship Flap in California from the 1897 Airship Flap in other states.

Eventually, I found scans of a privately printed book by Loren E. Gross: this had first been published in Fremont, CA in 1974 as “The UFO Wave of 1896”, before being reprinted (2nd edition) in 1987 as “UFO’S: A History 1896”.

Despite the title, Gross’ overall angle was far more Fortean than Ufological. Apart from quoting a local “W.A.” [I read elsewhere that this was “William Ahern”] at the end (who thought that the airship had been sent by “The Lord Commissioner of Mars” [p.27]), the phenomena were largely reported as if they were man-made, with some dissenters thinking it was a hoax.

William Randolph Hearst

In many ways, the story painted by Gross is as not so much about airships and strange lights in the sky as about how the competition between San Francisco newspapers shaped and presented that unfolding history. On one side, The San Francisco Chronicle and particularly The San Francisco Call eagerly searched out airship stories to an engaged public who couldn’t wait for the mysterious airship to do its (much anticipated) Big Reveal downtown so that everyone could see the unknown geniuses behind it. Yet on the other side, William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner went out of its way to rubbish the coverage (particularly from the Call) at every step.

We can see this in a poem (ok, doggerel) in the Examiner 26th November 1896 (reproduced in Gross’ Foreword), where the penultimate verse is aimed squarely at the paper’s competition (might this have been the Call’s editor John McNaught?):

One editor is certain / You really are a ship,
And most adroitly manage / To give his sleuths the slip,
He thinks that now, or later, / The human race will fly;
So can’t you, as a favor, soon / Take him aboard and try?
For if your motive power consists / Of force akin to wind,
He is as large a bag of that / As you will ever find.

The final verse continues the Examiner’s jabbing, basically asserting that the other paper is more interested in profiting from what the Examiner thinks is basically a fake story, designed to catch “suckers”:

Our faith it might be stronger, / But earth is rich in liars
Who do not pause to ponder / The future and its fires.
They’d see a ghost on every cloud / To sell the tale for space,
And spend the price for pie and cake / Wherewith to feed the face.
But come again, oh, toy balloons! / We rather like your style–
We see your catch of suckers / And join you in a smile.

Previously, William Randolph Hearst had taken the reins of the Examiner from his father in 1887 at the age of 17, but by 1896 had switched his day-to-day attention to the New York Journal. Even though Hearst lived on the East Coast, it was well-known that he kept a steely grip on the Examiner‘s editorial policy back in California.

All of which was why The San Francisco Call took so much relish, in late November 1896 at the end the Californian Airship Flap, in pointing out that the two Hearst papers had (in Gross’ words, pp.25-26) “engaged in a two-faced game”. While the Examiner on the West Coast “warred against the Call’s big headlines about mysterious airships by vigorously blaming the aerial visions on people who were under the spell of the Roman god Bacchus”, the New York Journal on the East Coast “excited New Yorkers with sensational tales of powered balloons zipping all over California”.

From the point of view of a modern-day historian looking back at the whole sequence, I think it’s quite clear that there really were plenty of witnesses who saw strange lights in the sky at dusk and at night, many of whom were able to see enough of the shape of the form to identify it as an airship, albeit one with an electric arc-like light and a strange lolloping bat-like motion. The only real reason the Examiner printed so many hoax-y / doubting stories was, I think, to supply a counter-narrative to the Call, not because its editors thought that counter-narrative was actually true.

So, the real battleground here was arguably the bitter American newspaper war of 1896, where Truth was always going to be the first casualty: any pretence at honest reporting was to be jettisoned like useless ballast if it got in the way of elevating Hearst’s newspapers’ circulations yet higher. In fact, my suspicion is that the Examiner‘s dishonest reporting of the 1896 California Airship Flap may well have been what caused so many later writers to erroneously conclude that this was merely some kind of “mass hysteria”. All Hearst’s Examiner needed was a counter-narrative not to inform but to annoy and enrage: you shouldn’t have too far to look these days to find newspapers that still employ this trick to great profit.

The 1896 California Airship Flap begins..

According to Gross, the first substantial sighting of the 1896 California Airship Flap was made by the household staff of silver magnate Mayor Adolph Sutro, at his (somewhat implausible-looking French chateau-style) mansion overlooking the Pacific Ocean west of San Francisco.

It seems a “strange object” had hovered in the air just offshore over Seal Rock. The darkness had masked the features of the unknown aerial thing, but a powerful light had been discernable on the rear portion as well as a row of lights down its side, as the object suddenly flew away toward the east, passing overhead at an estimated 500 foot altitude. [p.1]

We can see Seal Rocks roughly 200m due west of Cliff House in this early map of San Francisco:

What I find hugely interesting about this is that all the key elements of the mystery airship ‘template‘ we see throughout the main 1897 Airship Flap are already fully present here. We have a mystery airship with an unusually strong light (like an electric arc lamp) at the rear, a row of lights down the side, rapid acceleration, dusk or night-time flights, and a flight-path close (but not too close) to large cities and to nearby railway lines.

From a template to a secret history…?

What I’ve been trying to do is to use this template to ‘build’ my way back into the secret history of the device. For what they’re worth, here are my current thoughts:

The only practical means of achieving lift available in 1896-1897 was hydrogen gas: but because there are no descriptions of the airship ascending rapidly, my working theory is that it was not primarily intended to rise by dropping ballast, but that it instead used hydrogen gas to achieve neutral buoyancy. I further suspect that it had no air ballonet inside its main gasbags, to control its height above the ground.

In turn, what I think that means is that despite staying buoyant in the air like an airship, it handled more like an aeroplane (i.e. by driving it forward and adjusting its wings to rise or fall slowly in the air) even though aeroplanes hadn’t yet been invented. This mystery flying machine was, in short, a hybrid.

I also suspect that dusk to night-time flights were chosen not primarily for secrecy, but because of technical problems with maintaining stable buoyancy during the (hot) day-time. This makes me suspect that the airship design had practical problems with managing the pressure of its internal gasbags.

Furthermore, I suspect that railway lines were a hugely important part of the airship’s testing process, because they would have provide a reliable means for night-time navigation, and possibly a way for owners to track progress (via messages from telegraph offices, often located near railway lines).

As an aside, an airship flying at 500 feet or higher should have had no fear of running into things: the tallest building in San Francisco in 1896 was the Chronicle Building, which was a mere 120 feet high.

Finally, I think the bright light has to be a huge tell. Anything on board an 1896 airship would have had to have there as a matter of R&D necessity, not as a luxury or a nicety. And the kind of huge battery that would have been needed to power an arc lamp would have weighed (not literally, but not far off) a ton. Hence something else on board must have been creating that intense light, and it must have been creating it for a really good reason.

Having now spent a while trying to link all these strands together, I come back time and again to Dr Sumter Beauregard Battey’s airship design. This was a dirigible based on neutral buoyancy, with means for (what one might call) external combustion to propel it forward (in a moderately steerable way), and with controllable ‘wings’ to adjust the altitude. My suspicion is therefore that what people thought was the “bright light” was in fact actually the flying machine’s means of propulsion, the core inventive step of Battey’s patent.

I also can’t help but wonder if the mystery airship was built elsewhere in California and followed (on this very early test flight to Cliff House and Seal Rocks) the railway tracks going west through Oakland, specifically the Overland Route that headed way across to Nebraska and Iowa. The most obvious location on this line would have been the state capital Sacramento, some 90 miles distant from Mayor Sutro’s gingerbread-style Cliff House. It is perhaps no coincidence that the first newspaper report of a sighting (on the night of the 17 Nov 1896) was by Charles Lusk “at his place of residence at 24th and “O” Streets” in Sacramento [Gross, p.1].

The attorney E. B. Collins, who claimed to be representing the inventor (and whom the San Francisco Call harassed for days), asserted that it started its flight from “Oroville, in Butte County, and flew sixty miles in a straight line over Sacramento”. But… I have to say that I have my doubts that this was true. Dr Charles Abbott Smith at one point was registered to vote in East Bear River Township near Yuba, so I’m actually wondering whether Collins was representing Smith (and I believe that Smith wasn’t yet ready to build anything in 1896).

Thoughts on Gross

I think that Loren Gross did a very good job of bringing these newspaper reports together, and his book offers an excellent (if necessarily all-too-brief) walk-through of the 1896 California Airship Flap: well worth a read!

His first (1974) edition was based on a set of newspaper clippings collected by Vincent Gaddis. His second revision (1987) relied instead on folklorist Thomas E. Bullard’s “The Airship File: A Collection of Texts Concerning Phantom Airships and Other UFOs, Gathered from Newspapers and Periodicals Mostly During the Hundred Years Prior to Kenneth Arnold’s Sighting” and its supplements.

I cannot, of course, find enough words to say how much I now want to see Thomas Bullard’s Airship Files. I’ve contacted Bullard via Academia.edu, but if anyone has any other suggestions as to how I might get to see “The Airship Files” and its supplements, I am – like an overevolved rabbit – all ears.

The 1896-1897 Airship Flap is a slice of Forteana that I think is tasty enough to satisfy the appetites of both Ufologists and steampunk enthusiasts simultaneously. As such, it has plenty of devotees and debatable documentation, where much of the latter seems (unfortunately) to recycle the same underlying material. This post tries to filter out bibliographical noise to get a little closer to the faint signal beneath.

Essential bibliography

As always, even though there are more complete bibliographies out there, relatively few books and articles genuinely define the topic. So, here’s my suggested essential bibliography (please excuse spoilers):

• Clarke, Jerome (1966) “The Strange Case of the 1897 Airship”
  • (Spoiler: it’s aliens, but disguised as men with beards, because reasons)
• Keel, John (1973) “Operation Trojan Horse” (Chapter 5)
  • (Spoiler: it’s aliens, but somehow outside time and space)
• Cohen, Daniel (1981) “The Great Airship Mystery: A UFO Of The 1890s”
  • (Spoiler: it’s Venus, plus mass hysteria)
• Bartholomew, Robert E. (1990) “The Airship Hysteria of 1896-97”
  • (Spoiler: it’s mass hysteria)
• Busby, Michael (2004) “Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery”
  • (Spoiler: it’s C. A. Smith’s airship design, sort of)
• Danelek, J. Allen (2009) “The Great Airship of 1897”
  • (Spoiler: it’s some San Francisco millionaire in Sacramento / Oroville)

The last two of these are available as ebooks, and focus specifically on airships. Of these, while Busby is better on patents (though didn’t pick up on Dr S. B. Battey’s patent), Danelek is better on logistics (such as the likely connection with railroads). As possible aluminium suppliers, Danelek also flags both Alcoa (actually, Pittsburgh Reduction Company) and Swiss-based Alcan (so gets applause from the gallery for that).

Incidentally, Danelek includes not only the famous etching of Walter McCann’s photograph, but also another picture supposedly of the same airship. However, it looks to me (after a quick Google image search) like he was taken in by a grainy fake (the original was an 1875 etching of “A street in Parsons, Kansas”, below). Notice how everyone is standing in the same place and positions, 22 years later. 😉

Incidentally, Jerome Clarke remarks [p.16] that “one noted ufologist has concluded – and will so argue in a forthcoming book – that the airship was invented by an American scientist“, though I don’t know who that “noted ufologist” was. But in the end, Clarke’s argument seems to boil down to the assertion that “one must conclude, as Thomas Edison did, that “it is absolutely impossible to imagine that a man could construct a successful airship and keep the matter a secret”.” [p.16] The singular problem with Edison’s reasoning is that, for all its cleverness, the airship may ultimately have been unsuccessful – cock-up plus cover-up normally trumps a pure conspiracy argument.

1896 Airship Flap vs 1897 Airship Flap?

One thing to bear in mind is that there were (technically speaking) two separate airship flaps. The first flap was solely in California, started on Thanksgiving Day 1896 and ran for about a month. This was followed by a second (much longer) flap that started in Hastings, Nebraska (about a thousand miles away!) on 2nd February 1897, but then spread through many other states. The final sighting was (probably) over Yonkers, New York in later April 1897 (quoted in Danelek). There was also a report (Denver Evening Post, 13 May 1897) of the crash of a large balloon or airship off the coast of New York (quoted in Busby).

Even though many writers assume that these two flaps were both the same flap, that remains no more than an assumption. Jerome Clarke concurs that “there is no justification for the view […] that the airship worked its way eastwards from California after December 1896“. [p.10]

In fact, the history of invention is full of situations where two or more teams with technologically similar solutions are racing against each other: in this “race to market”, it can be almost impossible to prove who genuinely made the original inventive step. So we should always be suspicious of every source where the two flaps are automatically taken as a single “mega-flap” – right now, we simply don’t know either way.

And finally… William Randolph Hearst?

Nicely, Bartholomew (p.175) quotes Klass’s “UFO’s – Explained” (1976, p.314), that cites William Randolph Hearst in the San Francisco Examiner, 5th December 1896:

“Fake journalism” has a good deal to answer for, but we do not recall a more discernible exploit in that line than the persistent attempt to make the public believe that the air in this vicinity is populated with airships. It has been manifest for weeks that the whole airship story is pure myth.

What I find amusing about this is that Busby highlights Hearst as exactly the kind of capitalist ‘robber baron’ who would look to capture (and, of course, monopolise) this emerging airship mode of transport. Would it therefore be a surprise if Hearst – who himself had become so extraordinarily rich from the same fake ‘yellow journalism’ he criticised here – turned out to be both a critic of the 1896 wave and a backer of the 1897 wave?

Right now, I don’t really think so, but for now that’s no more than a guess. Certainly, though, it would not surprise me one little bit if the secret history behind the 1896 and 1897 airship flaps turns out to be far subtler and technologically competitive than previous writers have imagined.

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.

• b. 1 Aug 1896 (New York City, NY)
• d. 22 Apr 1936 (Los Angeles, CA)
• m. Eleonore Gunther Starke on 23 June 1923 at Oscawana on the Hudson, NY
  • Bryan Mann Battey Jr. (1924-2008)
  • Fraser Jackson Battey (1925-2006)
  • Lawrence Beauregard Battey (1930-2006)

Bryan Mann Battey Jr.

Served in the US Navy in WWII, where he “became an expert in languages“. Later joined the US Foreign Service and moved to Japan with his family.

• m. Jean Lewis (n. 1924 Larchmont NY – d. 12 May 2016) [Obituary]
  • David (of Washington DC)
  • Laura (of Sonoma)
  • Robert (of Alexandria, VA)
  • Megan (1957-2021) Obituary
    • m. George Todd (1992)

Fraser Jackson Battey

• b. 1925
• d. 2006
• m. Shirley Jane Altemus
  • Eleonore Jane Battey (b. 8 Dec 1960) [in Manassas VA]
    • m. Paul Davis Mullen (15 Oct 1983, McLean, Fairfax, VA)
  • Catherine Lynn Battey (b. 5 Apr 1954) = Lynn Battey Hunt, [Marshall VA?]
    • m. Kerry Stephen Hunt (11 May 1974)
  • Susann Fraser Battey (b. 13 Aug 1947, d. 1999)
    • m. Joe Frank Ireland (29 May 1971)
  • Dale E Battey (b. 1949, Iowa)

Lawrence Beauregard (“Bo”) Battey

Obituary

• b. 11 Jan 1930 (Oscawana on the Hudson, NY)
• d. 4 Nov 2006
• m. Jeanette
  • William Battey of Des Moines
  • Karen (John) Lipcamon of Cedar Rapids, Iowa
  • Howard (Cassie) Battey of Andalusia, Alabama
    • 9 grandchildren
      • 4 great grandchildren
• m. 4 Apr 1980 Betty Ann Randell (1929-2010)

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:

• Accounting ledgers / General Ledger #1, 1894-1902 (Shelf Shelf, Volume [2])
• Box 66, Folder 8: Contracts

As always with archives, though, you’re never going to know what’s actually in there until you stick your inquisitive nose in and have a look.

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.

I also found an article in an American German-language newspaper (Der Deutsche beobachter, 21 Oct 1896) which included images of both Battey’s Luftschiff and C. A. Smith’s Luftschiff:

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).

Legacy of Sumter Battey

Artist Adrian Nivola produced a series of pieces celebrating flight pioneers, one of which was “Homage to Sumter Battey, 2014, wire, wood, tin, found objects 14 x 30 x 10 1/2 inches (AN6998)”:

“Robur the Conqueror”

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.

More recently, Michael Busby’s (2004) “Solving the 1897 Airship Mystery” [I bought the Kindle edition for a very reasonable £4) revisits mainly the Texas sightings from this flap, and draws quite different conclusions.

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”.

This is perhaps where I should add that a 1900 edition of the Badminton Magazine of Sports and Pastimes included a long list of inventors promoting their airships (“navigable balloons”), including a Mr Sumter B. Battey of New York:

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]

Sumter Beauregard Battey of New York patented a neat-looking design for electric bicycles in 1895, so it should be no huge surprise that he also had an airship patent application that was accepted in 1893.

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?