It seemed a straightforward bill to put before Parliament: a proposal to allow a new airline to raise funds from investors and operate international air routes to Egypt, China, India and other far-flung destinations. But MPs greeted the proposed Aerial Transit Company with gales of laughter. Mocking prints of its aeroplanes flying over Egypt’s pyramids promptly appeared in Punch and in the newspapers. What was so funny?
Well, perhaps it was the fact that the Aerial Transit Company didn’t have any airports to fly from, runways to land on, or aeroplanes to fly in. Or, for that matter, any pilots. But company directors John Stringfellow, William Samuel Henson and Frederick Marriott could hardly be blamed: this was the middle of the 19th century, and aeroplanes had not been invented yet.
HISTORY did not appear to offer much of a prospect for passenger aircraft in the 1840s. Even balloons – which had the benefit of already existing – were having a hard time of it. A decade earlier, a group of entrepreneurs had announced a Paris-London airship route to be flown by the European Aeronautical Society. Their first ship burst as it was being inflated, whereupon thousands of spectators rushed in and tore it apart for souvenirs. The society’s second airship, the Eagle, was seized for non-payment of debts. The airline industry, it seemed, was nowhere near ready for take-off.
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But you’d hardly guess that from the prospectus issued to investors in 1843 by the Aerial Transit Company: The Full Particulars of the Aerial Steam Carriage, which is intended To Convey Passengers, Troops, and Government Despatches to India and China In A Few Days. Aerial Transit promised nothing short of a revolution in world travel. “An Invention has recently been discovered, which if ultimately successful will be without parallel…it would be a necessary possession of every Empire and it is hardly too much to say of every individual of competent means in the civilized world.” To get under way, it explained, all the company needed was 20 ambitious gentlemen with £100 apiece.
Absurd? Not exactly. Would-be aviators William Henson and John Stringfellow were skilled engineers hailing from the thriving lace industry in the English town of Chard. It was a curiously apt background: their experience with precision loom parts had trained them well in fabrication techniques. Stringfellow was making balloons as early as 1831, and the workshop behind his home was filled with part-finished projects in locksmithing, gunsmithing, clock making and botany. But heavier-than-air machines held a special place in his heart. He demonstrated their potential to one doubter by flinging a flat square of cardboard across a room. “There!” he exclaimed. “Any surface will hold the air with applied power!”
Determined to build an aircraft, Stringfellow and Henson deliberated over the best ratio of wing size to weight by shooting innumerable birds and studying their bodies and wings. They eventually settled on rooks as an ideal model. But birds could not be followed too closely: like their contemporary George Cayley, Stringfellow and Henson had concluded that a fixed-wing design was preferable to the complicated mechanics of flapping ornithopters. But fixed wings presented their own set of challenges, and so on train journeys Stringfellow would stick an aerofoil device out of the window, pondering the best angle and speed for generating lift. But here he had the benefit of a locomotive pulling him along; how would a fixed-wing aircraft be propelled? Why, with the very same power: steam.
A Chard newspaper reported in 1841 that Stringfellow was using the penny post to send “a steam engine, [which] seems the most curious and unlikely article to be transmitted by letter… It weighed with its package only 12 ounces”. Diminutive steam engines were key to the “applied power” Stringfellow sought, and given his skill at creating powerful lightweight engines, perhaps a successful prototype could be built.
Dubbing their proposed plane the Ariel, the steam air carriage would have a 50-metre wing span and fly 80 kilometres per hour. By 1843, Stringfellow and Henson were ready for the public, and Henson applied for a patent for a “Locomotive Apparatus for Air, Land and Water”. Their proposed monoplane bore a striking resemblance to early 20th-century aircraft: it had a cabin for passengers, propellers, wire-braced rectangular wings of stretched fabric, and a tricycle undercarriage. Although it lacked a vertical tail for stability, and relied on a sort of ski-ramp launch pad for take-off, it was the closest anyone had come to a viable aeroplane.
Local publisher Frederick Marriott promoted the company with leaflets for investors and fantastic prints envisioning the Ariel in flight over London. Parliament and press debated the merits of such an invention; Scientific American recommended aeroplanes to ease expeditions of the river Niger, while The Times of London ventured that “possession of the long-coveted power of flight may now be safely anticipated” if tests of a miniature prototype proved successful.
But that was just the problem. Underpowered and lacking the stability of a vertical tail, the design simply fell short. At public tests in central London of a 6-kilogram steam-propelled model during the summer of 1843, Stringfellow and Henson were humiliated by repeated failures. It simply wouldn’t fly. “A third, a fourth, and it is not known how many attempts were made, but with an invariable result,” reported the Morning Herald. “Directly the inclined plane was left [and] the model came down flop. Up to the present time, therefore, the world is no nearer flying.”
With these results they were unable to find backers, and by 1845 the Aerial Transit Company was grounded for good. Henson moved to New Jersey, where he went on to invent an ice maker, a safety razor and a cannon. Marriott migrated to San Francisco and founded several newspapers there, and in 1869 ventured once again into aviation, successfully building America’s first steam-propelled airship.
Stringfellow ruefully noted Marriott’s return, after two decades, into aviation ventures: “It may be to my advantage, as he owes me £100 with interest.”
Stringfellow had changed professions and joined the new field of photography, running a portrait studio on Chard’s High Street. But he never did give up on aviation. Wary of ridicule, in 1845 he tested another model in secret on Bewley Down; with a 3-metre wingspan and weighing just 4 kilograms, it could not withstand the stresses of a launch. Attempt after attempt failed. “There stood our aerial protégée in all her purity – too delicate, too fragile, too beautiful for this rough world,” Stringfellow glumly recalled.
But he did have one great success. A later model achieved flight inside a local lace mill in 1848: it was stopped only when it struck the far end of the building. This was the first powered flight ever, albeit unmanned, and it earned Stringfellow a permanent place in aviation history. He went on to experiment with designs for biplanes, triplanes and quintuplanes, and one promising triplane model built for the 1868 Aeronautical Exhibition was never launched because the exhibition hall wasn’t big enough. Yet the leap from models to manned flight remained insurmountable. As their predecessor George Cayley noted, aviation needed 100 horsepower in a pint pot. Had efficient petrol engines been available in 1843, it might have been Stringfellow and Henson, not the Wright brothers, who were household names today.
Still, their work had not been in vain. American aviation pioneer Samuel Pierpont Langley bought Stringfellow’s 1868 triplane to study it, while inventor Hiram Maxim wrote asking for details of his steam engines. And for an airline that never made a single flight or carried any passengers, the Aerial Transit Company had a surprising afterlife. In 1932, travel agencies were festooned with prints of the Ariel flying over the pyramids. Imperial Airways, one of the ancestors of British Airways, had adopted the old mocking Punch cartoon to promote its new air routes in Africa. It had taken nearly a century, but international airlines had gone from a laughing stock to the stuff of everyday advertisements.