Transcending Kitty Hawk: the Seascape Connection

By Edita McQuary

Those of us who remember “Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines” will enjoy Craig Harwood’s May 14 presentation at the La Selva Beach Library at 12:00 noon entitled “Quest for Flight,” subtitled “John J. Montgomery and the Dawn of Aviation in the West.”

Engineering geologist Harwood and Gary B. Fogel co-authored the book published in 2012. Fogel, a computer scientist, had previously written “Wind and Wings: The History of Soaring in San Diego.” The joint effort, “Quest for Flight” has received the Great Southwest Book Regional History Award in 2014 and the PIP Award 2014, and has been praised in many other publications.

During the last quarter of the 19th century, there was an international interest in airships, balloons and gliders. John J. Montgomery had an interest in flight since he was a young child. In July of 1869, at age 11, he begged to be allowed to see the airship, the Avitor Hermes, Jr., a friend of his father had constructed. When he got home he built a small-scale model of the ship.

He became an inventor and professor at Santa Clara College but continued his interest in flight constructing aeroplanes and gliders. He and his brother, Richard, experimented secretly in the Otay area near San Diego. It had to be kept secret because neighbors had a habit of deriding anyone who was interested in flight.

In 1893 at the International Conference on Aerial Navigation at the Chicago World’s Fair, Montgomery presented a lecture about his experimental flights. Harwood states that historians consider Montgomery’s flight experiments of the 1880s to be the first controlled flights of a machine in the Western Hemisphere.

On March 17, 1905 Montgomery held a trial flight at La Selva Beach where his “aerial expert” Daniel J. Mahoney, a professional parachute jumper, went up to “an altitude of about 2,000 feet, the balloon and craft suddenly struck a strong wind which carried it rapidly away.”

The people involved in early flight are numerous but, of course, the ones we mostly remember are the bicycle-manufacturing Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. You will learn that the West Coast had a much greater impact on the development of the airplane than was previously known. And you will find out how that came to be.

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La Selva Beach Library is located at 316 Estrella Avenue, near the fire station. Parking is available in back.