Dirigible Balloons Win the War...

5fish

5fish

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Look what I found a decade after the Civil War... A flying airship in controlled flight... The tech was there the south could have won the war...

Professor Charles F. Ritchell's Flying Machine - 1878 | New England Aviation History

Professor Charles F. Ritchell's Flying Machine - 1878
newenglandaviationhistory.com newenglandaviationhistory.com

Apparently any problems with the propellers were corrected, for on June 29, 1878, the Scientific American reported that Ritchel’s invention had made a successful open-air trail flight in Hartford, Connecticut, on June 12th. The Scientific American reported in part: “The first open air exhibition of Professor C. F. Ritchel’s flying machine was conducted at Hartford, Conn., on Wednesday afternoon, June 12.” (1878)
 
rittmeister

rittmeister

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en.wikipedia.org

Gustave Whitehead - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
born as gustav weißkopf in bavaria
According to an affidavit given in 1934 by Louis Darvarich, a friend of Whitehead, the two men made a motorized flight of about half a mile in Pittsburgh's Schenley Park in April or May 1899. Darvarich said they flew at a height of 20 to 25 ft (6.1 to 7.6 m) in a steam-powered monoplane aircraft and crashed into a brick building. Darvarich said he was stoking the aircraft's boiler aboard the craft and was badly scalded in the accident, requiring several weeks in a hospital. Because of this incident, Whitehead was forbidden by the police to perform any more experiments in Pittsburgh. Aviation historian William F. Trimble, pointing to a lack of contemporary proof, dismissed this story in 1982 as a case of "overactive imaginations." Whitehead's stated control method – a shifting of body weight – was said by Trimble to be insufficient to control a powered aircraft, and the supposed charcoal-fired steam powerplant could not have been powerful enough to lift itself off the ground. Whitehead was quoted in Pittsburgh newspapers in December 1899 as still constructing an aircraft, although he did say that he had flown it in Boston. A local historian claimed in 2015 that his research has uncovered evidence of the purported 1899 flight.
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5fish

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