Paul Chapman

From Discourse-3

Jean Roberts. A painting of Samuel Franklin Cody’s military kite trials by Cody expert Jean Roberts.

Jean Roberts. In another Roberts painting, Cody crosses the English Channel in a kite boat.

This year is the centenary of the first powered, and some say controlled, aeroplane flight in the UK. It was made by a middle-aged American who was probably better known at the time for his storytelling and theatrical skills. He also made a few kites and flew them wherever his travelling theater pitched up for a performance.

This self-styled birdman from Birdville, Texas (clearly a self-styled myth) had earlier crossed the English Channel by kite-borne boat in 1903. By 1905 he had flown in his 50-foot wingspan glider. And in 1906 he finally became Chief Kiting Instructor to those British Army chaps. Along the way he had undertaken man-lifting kite trials with the Royal Navy and had dabbled in airships.

This man? Samuel Franklin Cody FRMS [1].

Of course, he was not the first to get airborne in the UK. Surely the honor for that goes to Eilmer of Malmesbury in or around 1008 AD. Nor was he the first airborne kiteist. That may well have been Bristol’s George Pocock, who experimented with man-lifting kites in the 1820s. But Sam Cody and the British Army succeeded where Machine Gun Maxim failed, and particularly when Alliot Verdon Roe nearly flew (his words) from Brooklands in the summer of 1908.

Cody’s British Army Aeroplane No. 1 took about a year to build, partly because it was delayed by the availability of the French Antoinette engine. Then from August and September, Cody was dabbling with Naval Kite Trials at Portsmouth, as well as airship business at Farnborough. The first aeroplane flight (and crash) took place in a great fanfare of secrecy. The Army bosses didn’t know, although it was a well-photographed event.

Within a year, and despite being sacked for unauthorized crashing, Cody and his redesigned BAA No.1 had become a reliable flier. Sam Cody was a larger-than- life figure in the pioneering days of aviation.

He struggled against all sorts of odds. For example he survived a crash brought on by a collision with what his lawyer later described as a “suicidal” cow, and he went on to win the 1912 Military Aeroplane Trials. (The aeroplane is now in the Science Museum.) Sadly, this winner of the Aeronautical Society’s Silver Medal was never to build his Transatlantic Flier because he was killed in an accident to his Round Britain Waterplane in August 1913.