The Times,
Gainesville, Georgia, August 6, 2006
by
Rick Lavender
One man's "Apparatus for navigating the Air"
Tom
Reed, The
Times
Turnage walks
across the field next to Rattlesnake Mountain where her
great-great-grandfather was said to have flown a machine
like an airplane in the late 1800s.
"No
one knows what convinced Micajah Clark Dyer Jr. he could
fly more than a century ago. But many descendants of this
Union County mountain man are convinced he did. In a
boat-like craft built before "airplane" was a word and
years before the Wright brothers cleared a beach on North
Carolina's Outer Banks.
The Dyer legend even made it to a road sign last month.
State Rep. Charles Jenkins, D-Blairsville, sponsored a bill
naming a stretch of Ga. 180 near Blairsville as Micajah
Clark Dyer Parkway. "I think there's a lot of credibility
to the story," Jenkins said. Others will disagree. In the
southern Union community of Choestoe, however, the 19th
century "dirt" farmer some regard as a genius is a heavy
favorite.
Sylvia Dyer Turnage, a great-great-granddaughter, and her
husband own what was Dyer's farm at the foot of Rattlesnake
Mountain. Dyer supposedly skidded down the steep
mountainside on slicked wooden rails to take off. Turnage
recently showed two small models of his craft, made by a
family member. Plastic green Army men filled in as pilots.
The account of at least one eyewitness, who has since died,
and others passing along stories told as true about her
great-great grandfather are reputable, Turnage said.
"That's why this story has stayed alive."
G a. 180 leaves U.S. 129 north of Neel's Gap and south of
Blairsville, crosses the Nottely River, and whips past
pastures and creeks flanked by rumpled mountains. The
Appalachian Trail treads these highlands. Brasstown Bald,
Georgia's tallest peak, is a short drive up the two-lane
highway.
Dyer's mother, Sallie Dyer, moved here with her son and
parents from South Carolina in 1833. Micajah Clark Dyer
Jr., born on July 23, 1822, was no older than 11. He may
have been illegitimate, according to family researcher Ken
Akins, noting that the boy's father didn't make the move
and the child took the name of an uncle, Micajah Clark Dyer
Sr. Sallie remarried. But her son, called Clark to
distinguish him from his uncle, was raised by his
grandfather, according to a booklet Turnage wrote.
The new start in the Choestoe district came in a new
county. Union had been carved in 1832 from Cherokee Indian
territory. Choestoe is Cherokee for "Land of the Dancing
Rabbit." But life was no dance here. The mountains region
was rugged and remote. Farmers scrounged a living in the
valleys. Town meant Blairsville, the county seat
incorporated in 1847
Self-reliance was crucial. Neighbors could be scarce. As of
1848, Union's population numbered only about 5,800. By
then, Micajah Clark Dyer Jr. had married and fathered two
children, with seven more to come. He also had begun
studying the flight of buzzards and birds of prey,
pondering a mystery that would fascinate him for life:
How to fly. The Gainesville Eagle announced in July 1875
that Dyer had received a patent for a "flying ship." The
short account went on to describe the craft and highlight
the inventor's confidence that he had "solved the knotty
problem of air navigation." But the article also said Dyer
had studied the subject for 30 years and tried other
experiments, all of them failed until now. That work
resulted in stories passed down for generations, settling
into local lore like morning mist along a mountain stream.
Twenty years ago, Akins, Turnage's nephew, and a fellow
college student began backtracking on the stories. Their
work and that of others, including Turnage, reveal a
relative out of kilter with any picture of a backwoods
pioneer. Akins said Dyer, of whom no photograph exists, had
piped water to his log home at the head of Rough and Stink
creeks. The gravity-fed system, a first for indoors
plumbing in Union County, ran from a reservoir on the
hillside above the home. Dyer later switched from
hollowed-out logs to iron pipes. Family members now dead
also recalled a home with the logs hewn to a precise fit, a
yard strewn with "gadgets and stuff," as Akins said, and a
back workshop closed to all but a few and whispered about
by neighbors.
In the workshop, Dyer supposedly created a perpetual motion
machine, a Holy Grail for 19th century inventors. He even
sent a model of it to Washington, D.C. According to family,
his son Mancil inexplicably turned down a $30,000 offer for
the invention after his father's death. But Dyer was
working on something else behind closed doors. A flying
ship. "The neighbors thought he was loco," Turnage said.
"They couldn't understand why anybody at that time would
spend such time on such a wild idea." D yer wasn't alone.
The quest to create flying machines was growing worldwide.
An online database lists pages of U.S. patents involving
aviation from 1799 through 1909. The age-old desire to fly
was shifting from balloon flights in the 1780s to the
concept in the 1800s of a heavier-than-air, fixed-wing
craft with a propulsion system and movable surfaces for
control.
Peter Jakab, aeronautics division chairman at the
Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in
Washington, D.C., said that by the 1870s, "Serious,
established engineers ... were starting to take
aeronautical investigation seriously." That interest helped
spur research papers, presentations and data sharing,
building a mountain of trial, error and evidence that
Wilbur and Orville Wright later used. In addition to their
creativity and organization, the Ohio brothers examined
what others were doing. "They had a great ability to assess
the positive and dead-end patterns," Jakab said. They also
recognized that an airplane is a system of inventions, all
vital, he said.
The Wrights are credited with building the first fully
controllable glider in 1902. After adding a gas engine and
propellers, Orville Wright recorded what is widely
considered the first sustained, powered flight in a
controllable heavier-than-air aircraft on Dec. 17, 1903, at
Kitty Hawk, N.C.
Dyer had followed a different design to reach a similar end
decades before, according to family. Some who knew Dyer
said he first built a scale model of the craft, adding a
propeller turned by a clock spring. The model flew, they
said. Some people interviewed by Akins and Bob Davis also
said the same of the larger aircraft. Akins, now managing
director at the state's Etowah Indian Mounds Historic Site
in Cartersville, remembered talking with Johnny Wimpey,
Dyer's grandson.
Wimpey, of Blairsville, was 8 when his grandfather died. He
was nearing 100 and in frail health when Akins interviewed
him. Wimpey was sitting on a couch, his face blank, until
Akins mentioned Dyer's flying machine. "It was like he came
to life," Akins said. As a boy, Wimpey had helped Dyer
build a rock wall, and Dyer often had allowed him into his
workshed.
Wimpey said he had seen the flying machine. He had even
seen it in the air. Dyer reportedly built rails up the side
of Rattlesnake Mountain. He then slid the craft down them,
picking up speed to take off into a cornfield just across
Stink Creek. "He said he actually flew it up that valley,"
Akins said. Up, and back and forth, he said. When Akins
went to leave that day, Wimpey exclaimed, "I'm telling you
the truth!" "He kept saying that as I went out the door,"
Akins said. Wimpey's account, the tales of others about
Dyer's flights and the consistency of the stories made a
believer out of Akins. Yet, until about two years ago there
was only anecdotal evidence.
Dyer had supposedly applied for a patent. But none could
find it. Then a younger relative tried the Internet search
engine Google in 2004, an unimaginable option when Akins
and Dyer were scouring paper records in the 1980s. A link
to the patent popped up. Turnage heard about the find
during church. She hurried home after the service and typed
in a few key words. "I saw the patent," she said. "All my
life, I'd heard about the patent." Patent No. 54,654,
applied for in June 1874 and approved that Sept. 1,
describes in technical writing and sketches Dyer's
"Apparatus for Navigating the Air." The so-called flying
ship looks like a small boat under a tube-shaped balloon.
There are three flap-like wings on each side. Dyer wrote
that the craft can be run by steam or other power, in this
case paddle wheels.
According to the 1875 Gainesville Eagle account, which was
reprinted in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and at least one
other newspaper, the balloon lifted the ship. Dyer's patent
description says the covering could be made off any strong,
lightweight material that was waterproof and airproof.
Akins said some suggested he used boiled corn husks. The
wings, or flaps, worked up and down together or
individually, and could be angled for altitude, according
to Dyer. A rudder helped steer the creation.
The details and scope seem startling for a man who may
never have gone to school or read much more than the family
Bible. He certainly wasn't privy to the aviation schemes
circulating in engineering circles "The drawing is so
precise," said Jenkins, an aerospace retiree from the
former Lockheed Corp., "I would say somebody from Georgia
Tech couldn't do better."
The details didn't necessarily fit popular ideas of what
Dyer might have made. Those leaned toward a fixed-wing
craft. But the patent did match stories told by those who
knew him or his children. Accounts including pedals and a
body built of white pine.
The patent also helped lead to the road-name change,
celebrated in a May 31 signing with Gov. Sonny Perdue at
the Capitol and a July 15 dedication coinciding with a
family reunion at Choestoe Baptist Church.
Turnage acknowledges that she has been captivated by the
stories for years. She even wrote a poem, since put to
music, telling of Dyer's invention rising from the earth,
"a sight to behold indeed." It also is hard to find
longtime residents in Choestoe who don't know the story and
don't have some tie to the Dyer family. Most believe that
Micajah Clark Dyer Jr. actually flew. Roma Sue Turner
Collins said her grandmother, a Dyer, saw the craft
airborne. "I would just put my life on it that it's a true
story," Collins said recently.
Jakab might disagree. The aviation expert from the Air and
Space Museum saw only a rough sketch of the invention this
week. By those dimensions, which roughly mirror the
drawings in the patent, he said the balloon does not appear
large enough to lift the craft. The flappers, as opposed to
fixed wings, also were "one of the great barriers" to
advancements in flight, because the physics don't work for
heavier-than-air aircraft, Jakab said. Dyer's design
appears instead more in the line of a lighter-than-air
craft, because it apparently depends on a balloon to stay
aloft, and possibly as a dirigible or steerable balloon.
Whether that stance will float with Dyer descendants is
questionable. But there's another pressing question: What
happened to the invention?
Dyer died at age 68 in the winter of 1891. He continued to
work on his airship until his death. The Gainesville Eagle
story suggests that as of 1875 he had not built the
patented version of it. But he planned to, and according to
the family's research, did. After Dyer's death, the word is
that his widow, Morena, sold the aircraft to two Redwine
brothers from Atlanta or Gainesville. Akins writes that she
may have needed the money. The tale then is that the
Redwines possibly sold the craft to the Wright brothers.
The latter connection is open to speculation. The Wrights,
said Jakab, seem to turn up rightly or not in almost every
story involving the history of early flight.
But believers in Dyer's accomplishments will continue to
dig. The family is hoping someone will build a full-scale
version following the patent. There also is talk of
including Dyer in a 2007 exhibit at the Museum of Aviation
at Robins Air Force Base in Warner Robins. Turnage recently
walked visitors past Stink Creek, where Dyer had a grist
mill, and into what is now a hayfield where, as the story
goes, he took to the air. Turnage's home is near where
Dyer's once stood, overlooking the field.
On this hazy summer day, a plane buzzed high over the green
mountains. Turnage said someone once commented, "We flew
over your place," "I told him, 'Don't you think you're the
first guy to do it.'" She hopes to one day learn what
happened to her great-great-grandfather's aircraft, and
whether there's any truth to the Wright brothers story. But
Turnage, like Akins, considers one mystery settled.
Asked if she has any doubts that Dyer flew, she answered
smiling but firmly 'Oh, no'"
Originally
published Sunday, August 6, 2006 in the
Gainesville Times
Copyright ©2004-2006 The Times.
All rights reserved.
Go to the excellent web site about Micajah Clark Dyer and
his "Flying Machine"