AirSpaceMag.com

Wiseman-Cooke #2 Biplane, piloted by Fred J. Wiseman. Courtesy NASM.

The things he carried: A sack of coffee. Fifty copies of the local newspaper, the Press Democrat. Three letters.

Those letters are what put Fred Wiseman into the history books. On February 17, 1911, Wiseman—authorized by the Santa Rosa, California, postmaster—carried the first mail by airplane.

The Wiseman-Cooke airplane is part of the National Air and Space Museum's collections. It is on display, however, at the National Postal Museum.

To celebrate this milestone, Tom Crouch, senior curator in the Aeronautics division at the National Air and Space Museum, and Nancy Pope, a curator and historian at the National Postal Museum, will participate in a one-hour live Webcast on Saturday, February 19, 2011, at 2 p.m. EST (11 a.m. PST). The Webcast has been organized by the Sonoma County Museum (a Smithsonian affiliate in Santa Rosa, California), along with the National Air and Space Museum and the National Postal Museum; curators will speak for about 20 minutes each, then take questions from the audience.

“I think this event,” says Crouch, “being able to link our museum and visitors with the Sonoma County Museum and their visitors—I think that’s as neat a story as the story of the postal flight. It’s a way in which the Smithsonian truly can reach out in new ways.”

The National Air and Space Museum’s database notes that Wiseman’s February 17 flight was delayed by several days due to heavy rains. Almost immediately after takeoff, his home-built craft developed magneto trouble; he set down in a field (barely missing a windmill), where the thick mud broke his landing skid. Wiseman took off again the following morning, completing the remaining 14 miles of his flight while “delivering” the newspapers from the air.

Petaluma postmaster J.E. Olmsted’s enthusiastic note to H.L. Tripp, postmaster of Santa Rosa, was one of the three letters carried that day:

“Dear Sir and Friend:

Petaluma sends, via air route, congratulations and felicitations upon the successful mastery of the air by a Sonoma county boy in an airplane conceived by Sonoma county brains and erected by Sonoma county workmen.

Speed the day when the United States mail between our sister cities, of which this letter is the pioneer, may all leave by the air route with speed and safety.”

The Website airmailpioneers.org reports that Wiseman didn’t pursue a flying career. When asked why, he replied, “I didn’t see any future in it.”

Ever wonder what kind of takeoff a Viking Twin Otter can achieve with a stiff headwind and no sumo wrestlers on board?

Image from usedblooksblog.com.

“Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance…. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.” —H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds, 1898.

Wells wasn’t alone in thinking Red Planet Dwellers would be a complete fright to behold. Charles Warner wrote in an 1896 edition of Harper’s that, “[Martians] may be in the shape of a single wheel, able to roll easily anywhere, or in that of a sphere, or of a cigar…. The Martian lord of creation may have wings, he may be a gigantic insect, or a noble sort of eagle….. He may, indeed, have four dimensions instead of three, and instead of five senses a dozen, and among them common-sense.” Yeah, baby, Yeah!

For a wonderful online exhibition of "War of the Worlds" book covers, visit drzeus.best.vwh.net/wotw

The American astronomer Garrett Serviss wrote about Martian superiority circa 1905: “The Martian intelligences might look upon us as we look upon monkeys in a menagerie, and their learned doctors might say: ‘See what we were like once!… Give them time, and place them amid our surroundings, and who knows but that they might develop electro-magnetic vision, electro-magnetic hearing and electro-magnetic muscular control? They might even discover the secret of using inter-atomic energy, which has saved us.’ ”

An anonymous article appeared in an 1886 issue of the British magazine Chamber’s, speculating that Martians “would be about fourteen feet high on the average…. We should, therefore, expect to find that the Martialites have executed large engineering works; perhaps also their telescopes are much superior to ours, and we have been objects of interest for their observers.”

The examples above were gathered by K. Maria D. Lane, a geography professor at the University of New Mexico, for her new book Geographies of Mars: Seeing and Knowing the Red Planet (University of Chicago Press, January 2011). Lane argues that at the turn of the 20th century, the moment in which the public became obsessed with the inhabitants of Mars, European imperialism and American expansionism “produced an intellectual and social climate in which the view of Mars as an arid, dying, irrigated world peopled by unfathomably advanced beings was really the only interpretation of Mars observations that could plausibly been accepted by large numbers of Western scientists, writers, and audiences.”

For a Mars timeline stretching from 1700 to 1959, visit The Planetary Society’s page, which includes a blurb about the 1910 Thomas Edison-produced four-minute film, A Trip to Mars: “A famous professor discovers that when he mixes two magical powders, he has the power to reverse gravity. As he tests the concoction, some of the powder falls on him, and he is lifted up and flies through the sky until he finally falls on the surface of Mars. He escapes some gnarly-limbed trees only to fall over a ridge and land on the lip of a giant Martian.”

The X-47B, an unmanned combat vehicle being developed by Northrop Grumman for the U.S. Navy, made a successful first flight at California’s Edwards Air Force Base on February 4.

The X-47B is no small toy—it’s about the size of the retired Grumman F-14 Tomcat. It will continue to work toward the goal of demonstrating an autonomous landing on an aircraft carrier in 2013.

While the contract calls for a demonstration program only, the technology clearly is perceived inside and outside the Navy as the wave of the future. Pilots will still play an important role in air combat, but the military doesn’t mind assigning what they call the “dull, dirty, and dangerous work” to increasingly sophisticated unmanned aircraft. The stealthy X-47B heralds a system that could spearhead an aerial attack during the first phase of an air war, knocking out radar and communications networks ahead of piloted aircraft.

Its inaugural flight lasted 29 minutes, but the airplane will be able to fly much longer at high subsonic speed, reach an altitude of 40,000 feet, and carry 4,500 pounds of ordnance. It will remain at Edwards for further test flights until it’s moved to Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland later this year. Here’s more information. And look for an article on the X-47B in an upcoming issue of Air & Space/Smithsonian.

Eastern Air Transport baggage label courtesy NASM.

They work in all weather loading and unloading your suitcases, the mail, freight, even dead bodies and wild and domestic animals. They deice the airplane in winter, and clean it between each flight. So spare a thought for the airline industry’s baggage handlers.

Liesl Miller Orenic, an associate professor of history at Dominican University, has written a book on the topic, titled On the Ground: Labor Struggle in the American Airline Industry. Why baggage handlers, or “ramp agents” as they are known within the industry? Their work is categorized as “unskilled,” yet this group built a powerful alliance with their “skilled” coworkers, the aircraft mechanics, to improve their working conditions and wages. In her book, Orenic (who worked as a baggage handler for American Airlines and American Eagle at O’Hare Airport in Chicago) charts labor relations from the airline industry’s inception to deregulation.

Baggage labels circa 1978. (Photograph by Melissa A.N. Keiser, image courtesy NASM.)

George Poulos, who worked for American Airlines in 1956 in Chicago, remembers the introduction of jet aircraft, and how he and several coworkers made a special trip to Los Angeles to see the new DC-707s. He told Orenic that he wondered how something so large would get off the ground.

Jet aircraft transformed commercial aviation, even down to baggage handling. With the introduction of jets, freight and baggage systems became automated, reducing the numbers of handlers at airports. Working the ramp became far more dangerous; the decibel level of a jet engine was twice as loud as the rate considered safe for the human ear, and jet engines could suck in a person standing near them.

The work was determined by the seasons. “In the winter,” Orenic writes, “airplanes needed to be deiced. At Christmas, more baggage handlers were needed in the post-office and freight operations. In the summer, passenger travel usually increased with school vacations…. Several times a year, baggage handlers participated in a stationwide bid for new positions in their job category…. Through shift bids, baggage handlers could work with new coworkers every three or four months or could choose to work with the same four or five people year after year if their seniority permitted. This flexibility was one of the most attractive parts of the job…. For Rob Kranski, bidding different jobs ‘kept it interesting.’ Over the years he worked in the freight house, at the terminal gates, in overnight cabin service, in the packing room preparing pillows, blankets, and movie headsets, and deicing aircraft.”

Read a current baggage handler job description here, or watch the Discovery Channel’s Mike Rowe attempt to work the ramp on “Dirty Jobs.”