I love reading odd facts about damn near anything. For years I religiously read the Darwin Awards and while they offer stories on weird ways to die, they are at times humorous as hell. People might take offense to that but I really don’t care because funny is still funny regardless of the circumstances. I recently stumbled upon three short stories on death that actually became a part of history. They’re not all that funny but they are definitely interesting. Let’s get started.
On September 14, 1899, Henry Bliss stepped down from a streetcar at West 74th and Central Park West in New York City. As he turned to help a female passenger down the stairs, he was struck by a passing cab, making the 68-year-old man the first pedestrian ever killed by an automobile in the United States.
Five years after their historic first flight at Kitty Hawk, the Wright brothers took their new plane, the Wright Flyer, on a cross-country tour to prove it could safely carry passengers. The third stop was at Fort Myers, Virginia, on September 17, 1908. As a crowd of 2000 cheered, Orville Wright and his passenger, Lt. Thomas E. Selfridge of the US Army Signal Corps, lifted off into the sky. Then the propeller snapped in two and the Wright Flyer nosedived 150 feet to the ground. Selfridge was killed instantly; Wright suffered multiple hip and leg fractures that plagued him with chronic pain for the rest of his life. This was the first documented death on an airplane.
Here’s another oldie but goodie that occurred during the September 15, 1833 at the launch of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in England. It was attended by the Duke of Wellington and William Huskisson, a member of Parliament. Ignoring the engineers warning to remain on the train, Huskisson joined the other passengers and disembarked to gawk at the engines lined up on the parallel tracks. He stepped onto an empty track just as an engine called the Rocket barreled into the station. Huskisson fell beneath the wheels of the locomotive and lost his leg and died a few minutes later. He was unaware that he had made history as the first person ever killed by a train.
Let me start by saying I hate flying. Over the last 30 years I must’ve flown 500 times while working for a number of companies. It was “white knuckle” all the way for me, every flight, every airline. I had no choice but to fly but I didn’t like it one bit and still don’t. It was not the actual flying that bothered me, only the people flying the plane. I’m too much of a control freak to be comfortable having someone else with my life in their hands and that’s never going to change. Since we’re talking about airplanes today here are a few tidbits about the history of aviation.
Twenty-one of the first twenty-three astronauts who flew on space missions were either an only child or were firstborn sons.
The first aerial photograph was taken from a balloon during the United States Civil War.
After the first moon walk, in 1969, Pan American Airlines began accepting reservations for commercial flights to the moon, dates and time unspecified. More than 80,000 requests poured in immediately.
The first coast-to-coast airplane flight in the United States from New York City to Pasadena, California, by Galbraith P. Rogers in 1911, took 49 days. Obviously, there were many, many stops.
After the Wright brothers had flown four times on that historic day in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, a gust of wind overturned and wrecked their wooden flyer. They stuffed the pieces and fabric coverings into barrels and shipped them back to their bicycle shop in Dayton Ohio.
A German inventor placed an engine on an aircraft in 1900 and flew it successfully, three years before the Wright brothers. The inventor was Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, but the aircraft was not heavier than air. Von Zeppelin had invented the dirigible – the “Zeppelin”.
The first “airmail” letter in the United States was written by President George Washington, who gave it to the Frenchman, John Pierre Blanchard, to carry with him on the first balloon flight in America.
Astronauts circling the earth may get to see 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every day.
The first freight shipped by air from Chicago was loaded under an armed guard. Handled by National Air Transport, in 1927, the item was a “ten gallon” Stetson hat to be delivered to Will Rogers, the popular comedian.
A 31-year-old airplane mechanic named Douglas Corrigan took off in his monoplane from Floyd Bennett Field in New York in July 1938, and supposedly headed towards his home in California. The next day he landed in Ireland, saying, “I guess I flew the wrong way.” He became famous, paraded down Broadway, made a movie, and earned the nickname that stuck with him from then on, “Wrong Way Corrigan”.
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