FIRST MAN TO FLY IN AN AIRPLANE?
Always interested in mechanics and inventing, Jacob Brodbeck tried––apparently without success––to build a self-winding clock while he was teaching school in his native Württemberg, Germany. In 1847 he arrived in Fredericksburg to serve as the second teacher at the Vereins Kirche and then taught at other schools in Gillespie County. He married one of his […]
WOMEN PILOTS OF WWII
When the United States entered World War II, the top brass, including General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF), had doubts about women’s ability to pilot large aircraft. In the summer of 1941 even before the United States entered the war, two famous women aviators Jacqueline “Jackie” Cochran and […]
He Came to Texas Seeking Revenge
It’s hard to know what’s truth and what’s myth about the adventures of William Alexander Anderson Wallace. He was a nineteen-year-old working in his father’s Virginia fruit orchard in 1835 when he heard that his brother and a cousin had been killed in the Goliad Massacre during the Texas War for Independence from Mexico. That […]
Lindbergh’s Texas Visits
In 1923, before Charles Lindbergh became famous, like all barnstormers of his day, he wanted to boast that he had flown in Texas. When he bought his first World War I surplus Jenny in Georgia, he flew it to Texarkana. The following year, on a trip to California, Lindbergh mistook the Nueces River for the […]
AIRSHIP FLYS BEFORE WRIGHT BROTHERS?
Residents in the East Texas town of Pittsburg house in the local museum a full-size replica of the Ezekiel Airship, which many old timers declare flew almost a year before the Wright brother’s claim to fame at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Burrell Cannon, a mechanical genius and part-time Baptist preacher, inspired by the first and […]