90 Years Ago. SOARING: Germany’s Gift to Sporting America

In early spring of 1895, James Means from Boston envisioned an aeronautical camp to encourage students of mechanical flight to become acquainted with aeroplanes. To make this meeting a full success, Means, with his friend Octave Chanute, contacted Otto Lilienthal from Germany and invited him to come to the United States to teach Americans how to build, fly and repair gliders. The Cape Cod peninsula with its scarcity of trees and steadiness of wind seemed the most suitable location. For various reasons, the camp did not materialize.

Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, about 25 years later, German aeronautical designers had to work on the less spectacular, but still significant, development of low-speed, high-lift, unpowered gliders. German pilots called their motorless craft “sailplanes” (Segelflugzeuge), because “for all practical purposes, gliding or soaring is simply aerial sailing in three dimensions,”[1] Their success started a gliding craze that soon presented a challenge to the rest of the aviation world.

While the requirements of WWI advanced aeronautics in most participating countries, this was not the case in America. Capt. Eddy Rickenbacker felt that this had to change.[2] In the fall of 1922, he urged Americans to get going, “Come on America, Let’s Fly. Let’s get out of the dust and win back our self-respect and climb to the level of other.” Interest in general aviation increased a little, but there were not many big new developments in American aeronautics.

Members of the Aeronautical Engineering Society of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) decided to build and then take their two gliders to Europe to compete at the French and German glider meets in the summer of 1922. Their gliders, however, were not up-to-par with those flown by their European counterparts who were flying for an hour and more instead of just minutes. Would staging a gliding contest at the northern tip of the Cape Cod peninsula encourage progress in the American glider development? The envisioned contest did not materialize.

When Charles Lindbergh blazed across the Atlantic five years later, in May 1927, people awoke to the fact that flying was exciting and possible. Editorials stressed that gliding, or soaring, should be the next step for American youths with a penchant for building things and other youths with an urge to fly or do something different. However enthusiasts, young or old, wondered if there were ways to fly like the birds, without spending more money than they could branch off. There were three choices: (1) Do nothing and continue dreaming; (2) Join a model airplane group, build and fly homebuilt models and continue dreaming of going into the air in a much bigger model; or (3) Build a glider by yourself, which could be built at home for a relatively small expenditure.

However the basic question remained, then and even now, whether young America would have the patience to develop the supreme air senses that are required for motorless aviation, while so many opportunities were available for entering the motorized aviation branch with a hop, skip and a jump.[3]

Back in Germany, the North German Lloyd Steamship Co. with its broad-minded business views had promoted aviation for many years. When their New York manager, Carl Kurt Fröhlich, expressed an interest in promoting motorless flight in America, the company requested films, slides and other promotional material from the Rhön-Rossitten-Gesellschaft (RRG), who organized all gliding activity in Germany. With all this information and encouragement, Fröhlich, R. A. Pope of the Harvard Aero Club, Dr. Helmuth Grathwol of the Magirus Co., and several other young men, formed the American Motorless . . .