The Wright brothers were not the first to build and successfully pilot an airplane. They weren’t even the first Americans to do it. That honor belongs to a Sutter County boy whose earliest memories are of observing the clouds passing in the air and seeming to rest on the Sutter Buttes a few miles from his birthplace.
               John Joseph Montgomery was born on B Street in Yuba City in 1858, the son of the Sutter County District Attorney and a mother who recalled he used to lie on his back as a baby and watch the birds of the Pacific Flyway. At the age of 26, he became the first American to control a heavier-than-air craft in flight when he launched a glider off a hill just south of San Diego, controlling its flight for a distance of two football fields—a tad over 600 feet. That was in 1884, almost two full decades before the Wright brothers’ famous controlled flight of a motorized airplane at Kitty Hawk.
                Over the course of the next three decades, until he died in the crash of one of his own planes at age 53, Montgomery continued to improve his flying machines and trained men to pilot them, launching them at high altitudes from hot air balloons in dramatic public demonstrations that included loop to loops above Santa Clara College where he was a professor. After the aeronautical gymnastics, the pilot landed the plane at a pre-determined spot.  Following one demonstration, Alexander Graham Bell said, “All subsequent attempts in aviation must begin with the Montgomery machine.”  In 1906, Montgomery he was awarded a U.S. patent for the “aeroplane.”
                Why the Wright brothers and not Montgomery are credited with “first flight”—and why North Carolina might want to give up its state motto, “First In Flight”—are subjects of two books released in the last decade that describe the intense competition and jealousy that characterized much of the early development of the aviation industry, and set the record straight about Montgomery’s place in aviation history. Those books are Quest for Flight: John J. Montgomery and the Dawn of Aviation in the West, by Craig s. Harwood and Gary B. Fogel, released in 2012; and Achieving Flight: The Life and Times of John J. Montgomery by John G. Burdick and Bernard J. Burdick, released in 2017.
                Quest for Flight argues that while John Montgomery was not the first to make gliding flights, his experience in 1884 was different because he had designed his glider to allow control of the path the glider took, and that these were “the first controlled flights of a heavier-than-air flying machine in the Western Hemisphere.” Both books chronicle a decades-long campaign by Orville Wright to denigrate Montgomery and suppress knowledge of his contributions to aviation, including attempts to stop release of the 1946 Hollywood movie about Montgomery’s scientific experiments with human flight called “Gallant Journey.” Achieving Flight argues that the Wright brothers benefitted from Montgomery’s early work—which has become the basis for basic airplane construction ever since--but did not want to credit him or any other aviation pioneer for making any prior contribution to flying.
                Montgomery spent a lifetime studying birds and their ability to fly, beginning as a child in Sutter County. Later in life he studied the anatomy of soaring birds like buzzards, eagles, and pelicans, measuring their wing spans, studying their shapes, and weighing each bird. Like many early inventors, he initially believed there was something in the motion of the wings that allowed the “lift” in flying, and he spent some time building ornithopters—machines that were expected to fly under the power of humans flapping man-made wings--that never worked. It was not until he focused on how birds soar, or glide, through the air, sometimes long distances without flapping their wings, that he began making fixed-winged machines, and through continued close study of bird wings developed a knowledge of aerodynamics that was ahead of its time. He introduced the parabolic curve to wing design, and it remains the standard today.
                In 1905, Montgomery described that his interest in flying emerged because of the Sutter Buttes.
                “I remember when I was a little child in Yuba City—it was when I was almost five years old—watching with delight the passage of clouds across the sky and seeing those clouds resting, as it were, on the mountain tops, because I thought if only I could get there I could take hold of the clouds and fly; that I could grasp them and they would carry me with them. I think my interest in aerial navigation dates back to that time.”
                John Montgomery’s family moved from Yuba City when he was six years old. His father, Zach Montgomery, was a well-known Gold Rush era lawyer who became the Sutter County District Attorney and was elected to the California Assembly, representing Sutter County. After the Civil War, Zach Montgomery was appointed by President Grover Cleveland as Assistant U.S. Attorney General.
                John Montgomery died on the morning of October 31, 1911, as the result of injuries sustained in a crash during the 52^nd test flight of his latest generation glider, The Evergreen. A sudden gust of wind caused him to lose control of the glider and when it struck the ground a large bolt from the craft punctured him behind his right ear. His obituary ran at the top of the November 1, 1911 San Francisco Chronicle, as well as The Marysville Appeal (the article describes the home where Montgomery was born as being on B Street just west of the Sutter County Hall of Records).
                The Wrights’ assault on Montgomery’s contributions to aviation, which had begun when he was still alive, continued immediately after his death. Just two days after his obituary appeared, Orville Wright wrote to another aviation pioneer: “Montgomery had a number of admirers, but for what reason I never clearly understood, for I cannot think of anything of any value that originated with him.”
                In the rear-view mirror of history, Wright’s words look petty and ill-informed. But as a result of the organized campaign by the Wright faction, it took several decades for the world to recognize John Montgomery’s significant contributions to manned flight.
                But his legacy was understood by anyone who tested Montgomery’s designs over the decades. Airplanes of today incorporate Montgomery’s basic concepts, even those that have reached space. In 1962, the National Society of Aerospace Professionals created the John J. Montgomery Award, which was given in its first year to seven men who piloted the rocket-powered X-15 “spaceplane”. Among the recipients: Neil Armstrong.
                In 1964 Montgomery was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame at Dayton, Ohio for “outstanding contributions to aviation with his early research into the nature of the laws of flight, by building and testing a series of gliders, by developing improved methods of glider control, and by bringing widespread attention to aviation by the public demonstrations of his glider.”
                In 1967, Arthur D. Spearman, an archivist for Santa Clara University completed the first in-depth biography of Montgomery, which he titled John J. Montgomery: The Father of Basic Flying. Spearman asserted that Montgomery “gave to mankind the principles and the first successful example of basic flying, and that his basic principles are valid today. Basic flying is legitimately his child. He is the Father of Controlled Flight.”
                In 1996, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers declared Montgomery’s first glider an International Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark. According to the group, Montgomery’s glider was “the first heavier-than-air craft to achieve controlled, piloted flight. The glider’s design is based on the pioneering aerodynamic theories and experimental procedures of John Joseph Montgomery (1858-1911) who designed, built, and flew it. This glider was way ahead of its time, incorporating a single parabolic, cambered wing, with stabilizing and control surface at the rear of the fuselage.”
                In 2012, the authors of Quest for Flight wrote, “The fall of 1911 saw the passing of a true pioneer in the solution of human-controlled flight and the dean of aeronautics in the western United States.
                And in 2017, Montgomery was inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame, which noted, “his aerial achievements rank as some of the most important in aviation history.”
                The Wright brothers were not the first in flight, and never the best at it. The boy genius from Sutter County was the first to design, build, and to actually control his own airplane in flight.

 

Links to resources on John J. Montgomery: 

San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives: "John J. Montgomery History: Glider Pioneer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-5vfNDYFV4

International Air & Space Hall of Fame, inductee John J. Montgomery
https://sandiegoairandspace.org/hall-of-fame/honoree/john-montgomery

Turner Classic Movies, "Gallant Journey"
https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/27776/gallant-journey/#photos-videos

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, "John Joseph Montgomery:
https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/john-joseph-montgomery

Santa Clara University School of Engineering, "John J. Montgomery: Aeronautics Pioneer Gives Wings to Engineering at Santa Clara
https://www.scu.edu/engineering/centennial/stories/faculty-profiles/john-j-montgomery/