Charles Abbott’s Weird Patent and the 1897 Airship Mystery ~ folks "somebody" was flying shit around ? & this was how fuck~in long ago ?? um ah oh yea ...
- http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2015/05/charles-abbotts-weird-patent-and-the-1897-airship-mystery/
- May 4, 2015
- Micah Hanks
Less is said of the fact that, in April of 1896, a rather unique patent had been filed which read as follows:
CHARLES ABBOTT SMITH, OF SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA.
AIR-SHIP.
SPECIFICATION forming pm of Letters Patent No. 565,805, dated August 1,1, ieee.
Application filed April 2, 1896. Serial No. 585,893. (No model.)
Smith, in apparent seriousness, wrote in the patent’s description:To all whom it may concern: Be it known that I, CHARLES ABBOTT SMITH, a citizen of the United States, residing at San Francisco, in the county of San Francisco and State of California, have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Aeronautics; and I do declare the following to be a full, clear, and exact description of the invention, such as will enable others skilled in the art to which it appertains to make and use the same, reference being had to the accompanying drawings, and to the figures of reference marked thereon, which form a part of this specification.Smith, it is said, even had a scale model of his invention, which was on display in a storefront window in San Francisco, where it was visible to all who passed by. That, however, is probably the extent to which we can say his “airship” was ever actually realized.
More shall be said of Smith and his patent a bit later… but first, I would like to direct your attention to a rather odd, and seemingly coincidental note that would turn up several decades later, and of all places, in John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies. Here, the author recounts an interesting — if unlikely — parallel to the mystery of Charles Smith’s apparent airship aspirations: Keel gives mention of an 1897 news story detailing where a purported mystery aircraft had landed in Texas.
Of greater interest was the pilot, who had apparently not only stopped to fetch supplies for his aircraft, but also gave his name to a bystander on this occasion:
On April 22, 1897, an oblong machine with wings and lights “which appeared much brighter than electric lights” dropped out of the sky and landed on the farm near Rock-land, Texas, owned by John M. Barclay. Barclay grabbed his rifle and headed for the machine.He was met by an ordinary-looking man who handed him a ten-dollar bill and asked him to buy some oil and tools for the aircraft.“Who are you?” Barclay asked.“Never mind about my name; call it Smith,” the man answered.
Mr. Smith, I presume?
John Keel mused that such “common names”
as Smith were often found in more popular UFO reports that would begin
to appear decades later, likening the airship affair to the more recent
claims of exotic aircraft and, occasionally, those claiming ownership of
them. “In 1897, they often claimed to come from known villages
and cities,” Keel wrote, “and were even able to name prominent citizens
in those places. But when reporters checked, they could find no record
of the visitors and the named citizens disavowed any knowledge of them.”
Whether or not records of a Charles Abbott Smith could
easily have been found in Keel’s day is debatable, at least (though not
impossible, obviously). Today is a different story, with the
digitization of everything from census records and death certificates,
to a host of other information available through sites like
Ancestry.com. In short, digging up these kinds of records today
wouldn’t present the kinds of hurdles it set before researchers like
Keel just a few decades ago.
In that line of thought, it should be noted that Keel made
similar estimations about another man, who had been a visitor to the
home of a Mrs. Ralph Butler of Owatonna, Minnesota. Butler described
having an odd meeting with a man who stopped by her home unannounced in
May 1967. Keel described that this visit transpired in conjunction
with a number of UFO reports in the area, and speculated that the man,
identifying himself as “Major Richard French of the U.S. Air Force”, had
been no such character:
“Richard French was an imposter. One of the many wandering around the United States in 1967. For years these characters had caused acute paranoia among the flying saucer enthusiasts, convincing them that the air force was investigating them, silencing witnesses and indulging in all kinds of unsavory activities—including murder. When I first began collecting such reports I was naturally suspicious of the people making such reports. It all seemed like a massive put-on. But gradually it became apparent that the same minute details were turning up in widely separated cases, and none of these details had been published anywhere… not even in the little newsletters of the UFO cultists.”
Keel may have been right about the fact that there were,
in likelihood, counterintelligence programs underway that sought to
exploit UFO buffs and the “knowledge” they possessed. This might explain
the sorts of “minute details” that he kept spotting in places where
none should have been, and a few years later, realistic precedent for
this idea would emerge in the form one of the most famous UFO hoaxes of
the last century: the infamous MJ-12 affair that erupted in 1984, where
bad information (some of it obviously faked) was supplied to members of
the UFO community.
Keel had been wrong, however, about one thing: that this
“Richard French” fellow was not who he said he was. In fact, years later
the retired Col. Richard French would indeed turn up again, this time
announcing that he had been part of Project Blue Book around the time
Keel had written about his encounter with Mrs. Ralph Butler.
French can be seen in the video below, giving a statement
about his operations with the USAF during The Citizen Hearing on
Disclosure, held at The National Press Club in May of 2013:
As an aside of quasi-significance, it should be noted that
French has also made a number of unusual claims himself, such as his
alleged observation of a submerged UFO undergoing maintenance off the
coast of Canada during his tenure with the USAF Office of Special
Investigations (OSI).
Let’s return to that unusual patent belonging to Charles
A. Smith that appeared in 1896, and more importantly, the similar name
used by the alleged pilot of an “airship” seen in Texas the following
year. Here, we might at least speculate that Keel’s line of thought
pertaining to “common names” used by the kinds of “frauds” he felt were
turning up in relation to these mystery aircraft reports over the years
hadn’t been entirely spot on. Richard French was, in fact, precisely who
he said he was; but this alone does not support the legitimacy of a
“Mr. Smith” dropping down in his airship in a Texas town in 1897, let
alone his relationship with a patent filed one year earlier.
The notion that a working airship was in service in 1897
over America is not impossible, however, given the fact that similar
working airship designs had been tested, and even reproduced and sold in
small quantities as far back as the 1850s in France. The first of these
was Henri Giffard’s 1852 airship that, while crude in design, became
the first powered and steerable craft of its kind.
Of these early airship test-flights, a word should also be
said about the frequent insinuations that the popularity of two Jules
Verne novels published at the time, Robur The Conqueror and its sequel Master of the World, were
the influence behind popular “airship” reports of the late 1890s. Verne
had, in fact, been inspired himself by these early, lesser-known
designs, such as that of airship pioneer Arthur Constantine Krebs, whose
work is even mentioned briefly in Robur the Conqueror.
In the United States, airship test flights date back
to 1863, with inventor Solomon Andrews’ line of airships he dubbed the
“Aereon.” An experimental design of this craft was demonstrated before
representatives of the Smithsonian Institution in 1864, with some talk
of possible interest for using the device during the ongoing War Between
the States. However, as the conflict was drawing to a close, the idea
was swiftly abandoned.
Following the war, Andrews, in his
persistence, went on to form an outfit he called the Aerial Navigation
Company, with the intent of building his airships for commercial
transportation between New York and Philadelphia. However, financing
problems that ensued following the Civil War further complicated
matters, and left Andrews unable to find a viable market where the idea
could be sold.
Andrews’ idea hadn’t died completely,
though. Interestingly, more than a century later a new company, adopting
the same name as that which Andrews gave to his airship, attempted to
redesign Andrews’ airship. According to aviation historian John McPhee,
the twentieth century Aereon Corporation’s attempts to rebuild and
capitalize on Solomon Andrews’ original airship ideas directly
influenced the creation of inventor Daniel Geery’s Hyperblimp, as seen
below:
So there had, in fact, been airships that achieved a modicum of
success with experimental flight, albeit somewhat haphazardly, decades
prior to the “airship wave” that supposedly took place between 1896 and
1897. These early flights cannot prove that any real, working airship
was drifting over the U.S. by the turn of the century; however, the
technology certainly existed by then, and there were certainly those who
had already sought to capitalize on the idea of commercial flight.In Smith’s case, there would have to have been a certain amount of funding to, in the very literal sense, get his project “off the ground.” While this has remained a major argument against the Smith patent as a possible source of the technology behind airship reports of the 1890s, a news article appearing in the San Francisco Call, Volume 79, Number 91, on February 29th, 1896, described that Smith’s design was to be “filed with the articles of incorporation of the Atlantic and Pacific Navigation Company,” as can be read in the original article here. A relevant excerpt describing the project has been included below:
So maybe somebody did take the commercial airship idea seriously… and within months, newspapers were reporting that a “mystery airship” was seen over the same town where the patent owner, and the company who purportedly were in support of funding his project, had lived.
Whether or not a Charles A. Smith of San Francisco, California, had anything to do with the entire airship affair will remain in the realm of speculation, for now. There is, admittedly, more work that would have to be done to determine the legitimacy of the idea, if there were any to be found at all. For all we know, the idea really didn’t ever get the funding it needed, and it was forgotten, mostly.
One thing we do know, at very least, is that history shows us, even if Smith did build his airship, that he hadn’t been the first to attempt doing it for commercial reasons in America… not by a long shot. This is revealed in the story of his predecessors, the likes of Solomon Andrews, who had done far more than just toy with the idea… and who did so decades earlier than Smith (still) might have taken a crack at building the first fully-functional commercial airship industry in American history.
No comments:
Post a Comment