On July 4, 1878, a crowd in Boston watched a 25-foot cylinder of hydrogen rise from a baseball field. Inside a framework of steel and brass rods hung beneath it like the skeleton of a boat sat Mark W. Quinlan, a 27-year-old machinist from Philadelphia who weighed 96 pounds. He turned a hand crank. A four-bladed propeller sputtered. The machine kept climbing.[1]
In 1878, a 96-pound machinist named Mark Quinlan repaired a broken propeller with a pocketknife while dangling from a runaway hydrogen dirigible at 3,000 feet over Boston. He landed 44 miles away.
The machine rose to two thousand feet before the propeller stopped working. Quinlan could not get it to engage, and the wind was pushing him over Boston with no way to steer back. At three thousand feet, he tied his wrist and ankle to the brass frame, swung himself out of his seat, and repaired the propeller with a pocketknife he happened to be carrying.[1] He landed an hour and twenty minutes later, forty-four miles from where he started.
Charles F. Ritchel made his living designing talking dolls and model trains for a mechanical toy company in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Over his lifetime, Ritchel filed more than 150 patents: fun house mirrors, a belt that could inject poison into assassination targets, a gas bomb for land or naval warfare.[2] The dirigible was the thing he cared about most.
On June 12, at a baseball field behind the Colt Armory in Hartford, Quinlan cranked the machine into the air, flew it over the Connecticut River, and landed within a few feet of where he had taken off.[1] Aviation historians believe this was the first round-trip dirigible flight in America, six years before the French army's La France accomplished the same feat.[2] Harper's Weekly put an illustration of the machine on its cover.
When they tried again the following day, gusts of wind swept across the Hartford field. Quinlan rose 200 feet, then tried to find a current that would carry him back. He could not. He was swept five miles to Newington, Connecticut, and landed safely. The New York Sun reported that "Little Quinlan, even if he does only weigh 96 pounds, has confidence and nerve enough to go up in a gale."[1]
Ritchel's machine had a hand crank, a four-bladed propeller, and a cylindrical rubber gas bag made by the Goodyear company in Naugatuck. The brass frame was built at Folansbee Machine Shop in Bridgeport.[3] It had no engine. It could not fly against the wind. And Ritchel refused to consider adding a motor. "I have overcome the fatal objection which has always been made to the practicability of aerial navigation," he told a reporter. "I claim no more."[1]
After the Hartford and Boston flights, Ritchel and Quinlan took the airship on tour with a traveling circus.[1] Ritchel sold a few replicas and tried to develop a larger version cranked by eleven men. He envisioned a transcontinental airline. The idea never left the ground.
Dan Grossman, an aviation historian at the University of Washington, has never found evidence that later dirigible pioneers were influenced by Ritchel. "There are a lot of firsts in history that got forgotten because they never led to a second," he says.[1] Tom Crouch, an emeritus curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, says Ritchel was "one of the first to really come up with the notion of a little one-man, bicycle-powered airship."[1]
Ritchel spent his last years in Bridgeport and died there in 1911, just as rigid dirigibles were finally proving the technology he had championed. Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was running sightseeing tours over German cities in craft that could carry passengers and land where they started.[1] His scrapbook from 1878 to 1901 sits in the National Air and Space Museum.
