John J. Montgomery (1858-1911)
At the first light of dawn John J. Montgomery and his brother James picked up their rifles and a thirty-eight pound bundle of wood and fabric which they hid under a layer of hay on the wagon. John had coined a word for the bundle: "aeroplane." They stashed it out of sight and toted the rifles just in case any curious neighbors inquired about their outing. In the past, some jokes and ridicule about John's experiments had made the twenty-five-year-old inventor almost reclusive. If stopped, they could say they were going rabbit hunting.
Out on the mesa's edge on the family's Otay Valley ranch, John assembled his craft. The wings were shaped like a gull's wings, as wide as a baseball coach's third base box. The brothers waited until the breezes picked up. James had tied a rope on the front and waited a dozen feet or so down the slope until John shouted, "Now!" James pulled the rope and together they ran a few steps until the "Gull Glider" was aloft. At a height of about fifteen feet, the wiry, one-hundred and thirty pound John Joseph Montgomery flew six hundred feet to a graceful landing on an August day in 1883. It was the world's first controlled heavier-than-air flight and preceded Orville Wright's engine-driven flight by twenty years.
At a conference some years later, he described how a "bird man" felt: "I took this apparatus to the top of a hill facing a gentle wind. There was a little run and a jump and I found myself launched in the air. A peculiar sensation came over me. The first feeling in placing myself at the mercy of the wind was that of fear. Immediately after came a feeling of security when I realized the solid support given by the wing-surface. And that support was of a very peculiar nature. There was as cushiony softness about it, yet it was firm. When I found the machine would follow any movement in the seat for balancing, I felt I was self-buoyant . . . ."
The exploit and follow-up flights caused comments in the area southwest of San Diego. Later experiments up north near Santa Clara and San Jose were publicized, but Montgomery for years was virtually an unknown aviation pioneer. Even today many aviation history books neglect him. A movie, "Gallant journey," produced by Columbia Pictures in 1946, told his story. A biography, John J. Montgomery: Father of Basic Flying, by Arthur D. Spearman, also helped somewhat in correcting the oversight after its publication in 1967.
Born in in Yuba City, California, in 1858, John was five years old when the family moved to Oakland. As a toddler he liked to lie on a pillow and "pretend to fly," his mother said. He studied clouds, wondering if he could fly by catching one. He flew kites. He watched birds. At the age of eleven John joined a Fourth of July crowd in an Emeryville park as Frank Merriott piloted a steam-propelled hydrogen balloon, then the boy returned home and promptly built a model of the semi-dirigible craft.
As a young man he ferried across San Francisco Bay to attend Santa Clara University when it was still a college. He transferred to St. Ignatius College in San Francisco where he obtained a Masters of Science degree. In 1883 he joined the family on a farm called Fruitland on the old Rancho Tia Juana once owned by Santiago Arguello.
John's father, Zachary Montgomery had distinguished himself as a lawyer, journalist and politician, then slowed the pace down by taking up farming and publishing a weekly newspaper. Young Montgomery became foreman of the farm and promptly set up a workshop complete with a lathe in the barn. His sister Jane pumped the bellows on a steam boiler. The heat helped shape the ash strips into parabolic cambered wing ribs resembling wings of birds he had captured or shot down for his studies. The neighbors thought him a bit daft.
Montgomery continued studying and testing his aeroplanes in between college teaching assignments in Northern California. He earned his Ph.D. from Santa Clara College in 1901. A circus daredevil who parachuted from balloons, one Daniel John Maloney, approached him, saying, "I will have a balloon hoist me in your aeroplane to the four-thousand foot level, then I'll cut it loose and glide to the ground." Maloney's first flight, a twenty minute graceful descent, was a delight to behold. The second time in 1905 a dangling balloon release cable tangled above Malone's head out of sight. He died in the crash, with a gallant wave just before the impact. After recovering from the tragedy, Montgomery resumed his flights.
[According to Spearman, in 1894 Montgomery joined the faculty of St Joseph's College, Rohnerville, California, where he taught mathematics while continuing studies of air and water current impacts on edged surfaces, parabolic and plane. He later experimented with 4 foot and 8 foot wingspread model aeroplanes and built a wind-tunnel to vary experiments in degrees of parabolic wing-curve and length, fore and aft, rudder and rear stabilizer control, etc. At Santa Clara College, he worked part time for Rev. Richard H. Bell, S.J., on improvements in the Marconi Wireless. Montgomery patented an "Improvement in Aeroplanes" in 1906 and in 1909 completed an electric typewriter and patented an alternating current rectifier, which he sold to a San Francisco company.]
A doctor advised him when he was fifty-three that he should stay on the ground. [During two weeks in October, 1911, Montgomery made some 55 successful flights at a camp at Evergreen, south of San Jose.] Montgomery wanted one more time for an evaluation of some changes he had made in his latest craft. It stalled, side slipped and crashed. A protruding stove-bolt penetrated Montgomery's brain behind his ear. He died before a doctor could reach the scene, October 31, 1911.
His findings and airplane designs finally earned him a well-deserved place with Octave Chanute and Dr. Samuel Pierpont Langley as American pioneers in controlled flight before the Wright brothers accomplished their Kitty Hawk milestone.
[biographical sketch adapted from San Diego Originals by Theodore W. Fuller, published by California Profiles Publications, 1987]
Order prints of images from the Photo Archives of the San Diego Historical Society. Print out the photos you want reproduced, with the SDHS photo number. This will help us know exactly what photos you want.
