The "Wright-Type" Glider
The Wrights testing their 1902 Glider; the first heavier-than-aircraft to be fully controllable about all three axes of movement. There is speculation that Preston Watson built a "Wright Type" glider, but no concrete evidence exists to suggest he actually did - he certainly never admitted to doing so within his lifetime. The Trustees of the National Museums of Scotland.
It has often been suggested that Preston Watson built four aircraft in total, the first of which was described by J. D. Gillies and J. L. Wood in the book Aviation in Scotland as "...a primitive Wright-type glider, which was fitted with an engine of French manufacture but was not a success."
On examining the evidence that Preston's younger brother James had provided in support of his claim that Preston flew a powered aeroplane in the summer of 1903, aviation researcher Charles Gibbs-Smith drew conclusions in his book The aeroplane: an historical survey of its origins and development (HMSO, London 1960), surmising that a possible first Watson aircraft would have probably resembled;
"...a primitive Wright-type aircraft with [a] forward elevator, built after Preston had heard of Octave Chanute's lectures and articles (in 1903) on his own and the Wright's gliders."
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So, did Preston Watson build a glider, and what form did it take? Whilst investigating the Watson case, Gibbs-Smith met a close friend of the Watson family, former head of Kings College Dental Department, dental surgeon John Bell Milne, who claimed to have seen Preston's earliest flying machine. In an interview he gave in 1961, Milne remembered that Watson constructed his glider in a shed on the premises of his cousin Charlie Yeaman, of Yeaman and Baggesen, Marine Engineers of Dundee, stating that the date was, "...late 1903 or early 1904", at the time he and Preston, "...were attending physics classes at University College [Dundee]." In correspondence with Gibbs-Smith, Milne described the aircraft as, "...definitely a glider, it had skids. It was of normal biplane build, both wings in the same span. It had an elevator out front."
According to James Watson, the two brother's sister Effie sewed the fabric on to the wings, echoing British glider pioneer Percy Pilcher's sister Ella assisting him with the construction of his gliders. Despite his descriptions, Milne emphatically stated that he never actually witnessed Watson flying his biplane glider.
A reproduction of the Wright Brothers' 1900 glider at the Virginia Air and Space Museum. Is this what Watson's so-called "Wright Type" glider might have looked like? An eyewitness claimed that it "...had an elevator out front" as illustrated here, but no other means of control were hinted at. Preston's younger brother James claimed that his glider was a rocking wing aircraft, however. Author.
Peculiarly, in a letter to Gibbs-Smith dated 15 August 1957, James discredited Milne's earlier testimony, advising that because he was not present in 1903, he could not have seen the machine that he and Preston were testing was a rocking-wing aeroplane, criticising the fact that Milne saw a biplane glider that had a front-mounted elevator.
Two years earlier, James wrote an article outlining Preston's achievements as he remembered them in the December 1955 issue of Aeronautics magazine, stating that, "Preston's first aeroplane was without an engine."
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"it was pulled by a rope at sufficient speed along the level till it became airborne. It left the ground carrying a pilot and made sufficient flights to enable Preston to become convinced that his theory of flight was possible, provided sufficient power could be obtained to take the place of the pull by the rope caused by the falling weights. These trial flights were made at Errol in the summer of 1903."
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The falling weights and rope refer to the assisted method of taking off, which has been described as being akin to that which the Wright Brothers devised in 1904 at Huffman Prairie, near Dayton, Ohio. In a previous issue of Aeronautics, of February 1954, in which James' interruption of the Jubilee dinner held by the Royal Aeronautical Society in December 1953 is covered, it states that, "The first aircraft was built as a glider and subsequently fitted with an engine bought from Santos-Dumont [sic]."
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Two years after this surprising admission, considering he had advocated Preston's powered flights in the summer of 1903 two years prior, James sent a letter to Gibbs-Smith dated 26 July with the following statement;
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"I make no claim that the machine that Preston used in 1903 at Errol was a powered machine, but it was a rocker, of that I am certain."
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What is most curious about these assertions is that they are in direct contradiction to the entire case that James had expended so much time and effort collecting evidence and eyewitness accounts in support of - that Preston Watson made powered flights at Errol in the summer of 1903 - before the Wright brothers made theirs in December that year!
Since the Manchester Guardian had published the following in its 15 December 1953 issue; "Mr J. Y. Watson, of Blairgowrie, Perthshire, has stated that his brother, Preston Watson, made a powered flight of between fifty and a hundred yards in 1903, the year in which the Wright brothers first flew. He has said that witnesses of the event are still alive.", the question then has to be asked, why did James authorise publishing in an aviation specific magazine contrary statements that fly in the face of what he was busily attempting to prove around the same time?
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This does put the veracity of James' entire case into question, although these accounts certainly appear to lend weight to the theory that Preston did indeed build and fly a glider, but was it a rocking wing aircraft, as emphatically stated by James, or was it as Milne described - a "Wright Type" device? And what of James' claim that it was fitted with an engine acquired from the famous Paris domiciled Brazilian balloon pioneer?
A number of published sources accept this claim, the engine in particular being a Dutheil Chalmers horizontally opposed type acquired in 1906, according to James in his 1955 Aeronautics magazine article. Despite Milne also asserting to Gibbs-Smith that the year the motor was purchased was indeed 1906, this was not possible, since Dutheil Chalmers & Cie did not build their first aero-engine until 1907.
Somewhat telling is that in the interview Milne gave in 1961 he changed the date Watson purchased the engine from Alberto Santos Dumont to 1907! Photographs show a Dutheil Chalmers motor fitted to Watson's first aeroplane, built in 1909, therefore it is likely that the engine bought from Santos Dumont, at a later date than was insisted on by both James and Milne, however, was intended for this machine.
An account that appeared in the Vol. XLII No. 6 - June 1957 issue of Meccano Magazine stated that Watson fitted a small De Dion motorcycle engine to his glider, and that later two motors were coupled together. This would not have had the desired effect either, since no type of automobile engine available at the time would have had the right power-to-weight ratio required to power an aeroplane in flight. From photographs of Watson's first aeroplane the unusual configuration of the Dutheil Chalmers engine can be seen; the propeller was mounted between two horizontally opposed banks of cylinders, resembling two different motors coupled together.
According to legend, fitted to Watson's newly acquired motor was a propeller constructed by a Mr Kerr B. Sturrock, who claims that he made over a dozen for Watson in 1905. Some fifty years later Sturrock offered to James recollections of assistance he gave to Preston, recorded in 1957 as the following;
"The first propellers were of oak or yellow pine. They were soon fractured, and then Mr Sturrock tried shaping them from laminated sheets of 5/8in. Australian walnut, each sheet being laid with its grain at a different angle from that of the one before it."
Fitted with its engine and propeller, James asserted in Aeronautics in December 1955 that, "this little aeroplane, though it stayed in flight sufficiently long enough to cover at least 200 yards, would not remain completely airborne." "This was the year 1906."
Indulging in the argument, Charles Gibbs-Smith best places the claim that Preston bought a motor for his glider into perspective, stating that;
"...it was impossible to purchase up to 1905 or 1906 a petrol motor of a power-weight ratio anywhere near favourable enough to allow powered flight, to say nothing of the severe difficulties in designing and making an adequate propeller. Faced with this problem, the Wrights, after three years of intensive theoretical and practical research into aerodynamics and propellers, and the construction and operation of three gliders, designed and constructed their own engine in 1903."
A reproduction of the Wright's assisted take-off device they used to launch their aeroplanes with, on site at Huffman Prairie, outside of Dayton, Ohio, where they conducted flights in their 1904 and 1905 Flyers. It is rumoured that Preston Watson used such a device to get his first aircraft airborne, but substituting the framework for a tree from which the weights were suspended. Author.
James also stated that Preston's first aircraft took off with the aid of an assisted take-off device similar to that used by the Wrights for the first time at Huffman Prairie in September 1904. Gibbs-Smith refutes the suggestion entirely that Preston conceived this kind of mechanism for launching his aircraft before the Wrights did, accusing James Watson and supporters who recalled seeing this device in action of "memory telescoping";
"it is inconceivable to me that a young man isolated in Scotland in that year 1903 - should have hit upon exactly the same method (except that he substituted a tree branch for the derrick from which the weight fell) as the Wrights devised in 1904."
Despite this however, in his book The aeroplane: an historical survey of its origins and development, Gibbs-Smith confirms his own presumption behind whether Watson built an aircraft in 1903 with the statement, "...my supposed powered Wright-type glider of Preston's..." That he describes it as a possible primitive Wright-type is merely a counter to James' early assertions that the machine Preston built and flew in 1903 was a rocking wing type, the first of which he did not begin constructing until 1909. Because of Gibbs-Smith's description, it is accepted without question by many that Watson's first aircraft was an unsophisticated Wright glider copy.
Even if 1903 was the year in which Preston first flew a glider it was by no means unprecedented, even within the British Isles. The United Kingdom already had a glider pioneer of its own in the late Percy Sinclair Pilcher, who had built four gliders and had carried out many flights by the time of his accidental death in 1899. At that time Preston was only 19 years old. With all the presumption surrounding Preston’s flying experiments; it is worth mentioning that he never made any mention of building any aircraft prior to his rocking wing machines.
This, coupled with the duplicity of intent that James displayed in contradicting himself, it is difficult to accept that Preston flew a glider in 1903, let alone a rocking wing one, particularly since no solid evidence of such a thing has been found. Preston did not submit his rocking wing patent for publication until 1909, and with his previous patent on flying machines revealing his prior level of understanding of the subject makes a rocking wing aircraft of any sort in 1903 highly unlikely.
Apart from Milne, no eyewitness accounts in support of a Watson glider have appeared either - and Milne never saw it being flown, if it did in fact, exist. All of those witness statements collected by James claim that they saw a powered aeroplane at Errol in 1903. Because of James' contradictory stance in disclaiming his own initial statements, thereby unintentionally discrediting the very eyewitnesses he had contacted for support, it is farcical to accept in the slightest the proposition that Preston Watson flew anything in 1903 - he was 23 years old and still in full-time study.
Now, read about Watson's first aeroplane: