John H. Whitney’s work for Glenn Curtiss

Getting the photos that got the job

I was in my senior year in engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, when in my spare time I began to play about with other aviation amateurs. We wanted to fly in the worst way and usually did. We amateurs in aviation of those early days were more lucky than we realized. Our dearest wish was to get into the air with our mostly impossible, machines. An overwhelming fact never occurred to us, that if we had by some miracle gotten up into the air in our machines we would not have known how to control them. No, we never thought of that.

The Morrell dirigible

About that time (1908), a man named John Morrell crowned a spectacular career by floating stock to build a dirigible that the prospectus said would revolutionize —  these things always revolutionize. It was of the usual dirigible type, but a block long. Inflated by a special gas main laid by the city of Berkeley. It was worse than incredible that the long gas bag did not have separate compartments as it would if Morrell had had the slightest knowledge of aviation. All he knew was ballooning and not too much of that.

The great day came to give the first demonstration. There was a sort of under carriage, if you could call it that, it really was a block long mattress similar in composition to the ordinary mattress of your bed but a block long. Then there were at intervals gas engines with propellers attached. Morrell's dream was that it would float. This runway-mattress would allow the crew to move back and forth and the gasoline engines would turn the propellers and the thing would air travel; that was Morrell's idea-dream.

The reality of course was 100 percent different. As the city gas was turned on, the bag slowly inflated and somehow fairly evenly and finally went up slowly and on a fairly even keel. It rose perhaps 400 or even 500 feet and then slowly tilted. Morrell had, of course, not foreseen this nor provided any means to keep an even keel. Now as it tilted, of course, the gas rushed to the high end and this increased the tilt. This continued until the pressure of the gas at the top became so great it finally burst the envelope and the gas began to escape. This stopped the rise. It paused, and then slowly began to descend. They had wisely chosen a day of no wind. If there had been any wind they never would have gotten that far.

It came down faster and faster until finally, the lower end struck the ground with considerable force. Then, as it descended further, more and more of the runway touched the ground until it was all laid out almost exactly on the spot it started from. Otherwise, if it had landed among the buildings … By God's mercy the gas was not ignited, one little match would have done it. Cigarettes were not so universal then as now and there were no automatic lighters. So the worst that happened was broken legs and arms of the crew. No one was killed and no one was permanently injured.

I was photographing it using a panoramic camera that produced a very wide picture and could show the whole long gas bag while staying close enough to show small details, such as the crew. Ordinary pictures showed only one part, or if they set their cameras far enough back to include all its long length, the scale was so small that details, such as the crew, did not show well.

My pictures were published in Colliers magazine and I had sent copies to Glenn Curtiss along with a job application letter. I sent similar material to the Wright brothers but never heard from them. I afterward learned that this was their way, but Curtiss had replied and showed some interest. If I had known then what I learned later about Curtiss, I would have taken the first train east and presented myself to him in his small obscure village in the Finger Lake region of northern New York State. But over cautious, I didn't, but waited until Curtiss himself came to Los Angeles in 1910.

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