Glenn Curtiss and the first flight from water
as told by Joseph Jessop

Glenn Curtiss came here and started a school on North Island. He had a son who was my age and we were great friends. Curtiss decided that he'd like to get an airplane that would take off from the water. Well, I was the only kid around with a boat - a rowboat. The time came for him to try and get off the water with an airplane and he said "Joe, I'd like to have you help me." He said "I can only put in one gallon of gasoline, I don't want to put any weight on this thing. Take one gallon at a time." And so he tried and tried and tried to get off and finally one day he said "Joe, let's get over there at six o'clock in the morning." And he had a fifty gallon drum of gasoline. And my job was to take a gallon at a time out and he'd run back and forth and try and get off the water.

Well what happened was the water was like glass and he couldn't quite get enough air under the pontoons to get off. Well about eleven o'clock in the morning anytime the wind begins to come up from some direction there and about eleven o'clock that day - we started at six o'clock - eleven o'clock the breeze came up and by golly he went down toward the end of North Island and started back and darned if he didn't get off about six feet and flew about two or three hundred yards and down again and that was the first time an airplane had ever gone off the water.

And so in the deal - he was as skinny as a rail, because he worked all the time and his brain was going a hundred miles an hour - he took over an apple pie with him and he set it over on the side and he said "Joe, if I get off the water you and I are going to divide that apple pie." Well I was about - I forget how old I was - that was a big deal as far as I was concerned - my appetite was enormous anyway. Sure enough, he got off. But he hadn't used up all the gasoline in this one gallon can. So he came back ashore, and he got the apple pie and he put it on the fifty gallon drum. But then he decided he'd pour the half-gallon he had left back into the fifty gallon drum. Well he was so nervous that he spilled gasoline all over this pie and that was the end of the apple pie.

Curtiss flying his Triad (note center pontoon, rear engine) at Spanish Bight, North Island on February 26, 1911, one month after his first flight from water

More about Glenn Curtiss with some early postcard photographs.

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