August 1909: First passenger flight

Sometimes you have to do a little digging to discover the story behind an item in The Engineer. Having the benefit of hindsight, we can appreciate what an important event the world’s first passenger flight was: the birth of the whole commercial aviation industry. But to our predecessors in 1909, it only merited four paragraphs, and skipped the background of possibly one of the most eccentric individuals who has ever graced our pages.

The first passenger flights — two of them — took place at Aldershot in a large biplane designed and built by Samuel Franklin Cody, an American who’d been living in the UK since 1890. To call Cody an interesting chap would be an understatement. Aeronautics was his second profession: his first was Wild-West showman.

Growing up in Iowa at the end of the 19th century, Cody learned to ride, shoot, train horses, use a lasso and hunt buffalo, and spent some time prospecting for gold in Alaska. He then turned to showbusiness, changed his name (he was born Franklin Cowdery) and toured the US as ‘Captain Cody, King of the Cowboys’, performing feats of horsemanship and sharpshooting. He later took the show to Europe, and around this time became interested in kites, competing with his adopted son to build bigger and bigger versions.