Brightwood and the Lost Airships
An Indianapolis airship company of 1892, the mystery airships of 1897, and the inventors history left out of the story of flight.
- 1The Lost History of Brightwood & Homer Trump
In April 1920, Charles August Albert Dellschau was nearly ninety years old and still filling enormous handmade books with flying machines. His pages were crowded with oval airships, mechanical devices, handwritten notes…
- 2Homer Trump and the Lost Airships of the 1800s
In April 1920, Charles August Albert Dellschau was nearly ninety years old and still filling enormous handmade books with flying machines. His pages were crowded with oval airships, mechanical devices, handwritten notes…
- 3The Great American Airship Mystery of 1897
In November 1896, readers of the San Francisco Call began encountering reports of something extraordinary moving through the California sky. Witnesses described mysterious lights, strange shapes, and what some believed to be a…
- 4The Indiana Airship Company that History Forgot
In 1892, years before the Wright brothers reached Kitty Hawk, a group of men in Indianapolis incorporated a company devoted to navigating the air.
- 5Before the Wright Brothers, America Was Already Building Airships
When the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903, they accomplished something extraordinary, but they did not suddenly create the idea of powered flight. By the time Orville Wright lifted from the sand at Kill Devil Hills…
- 6The Lost Airship Company of Brightwood
In the standard history of American flight, 1903 exerts so much gravity that the years before Kitty Hawk can begin to look almost empty. There were balloons, gliders, strange patents, failed machines, and a long parade of…
- 7The Industrial World Behind the Brightwood Airship Mystery
When Brightwood appears in the strange history of American flight, it usually enters the story in 1892. That is the year the Brightwood Aerial Navigation Company appears, followed by the familiar questions: What were they…
- 8Homer Trump and the Lost Airship Trail to Brightwood
A century after Charles Dellschau made his strange airship pages, one word has acquired enough cultural weight to overwhelm almost everything else around it. The word is Trump. On a Dellschau work dated April 1920, it appears in…
- 9NYMZA: The Secret Airship Society Hidden Inside Charles Dellschau’s Notebooks
Charles Dellschau left behind thousands of pages of impossible flying machines, dead inventors, coded marks and newspaper clippings. Then a later investigator claimed he had decoded the name of the organization behind it all…
- 10Wright Before Flight: The Indiana Story Hidden Behind the Airplane
The standard Wright brothers story begins almost at the end. A bicycle shop in Dayton becomes a laboratory, two obscure mechanics solve the problem of controlled flight, and on December 17, 1903, a machine rises from the sand at…
- 11The Narrative Bureau: From Brightwood to Nassau
The strange thing about technological history is that the machine rarely arrives alone. Before a technology becomes ordinary, somebody has usually imagined it, financed it, patented it, demonstrated it, written stories about it…
- 12The Boys Who Learned to Spy: Scouts, Airships, Wireless Sets and the Making of America’s Junior Intelligence Hero
There is a forgotten figure sitting at an unusually revealing junction in American popular culture. His name was Harry Lincoln Sayler. Before he became a prolific author of boys’ aviation adventures, Sayler passed through Indiana…