In the brief but glorious history of pioneer work in aviation, so far as
it applies to this country, there is scarcely a more romantic figure to
be found than Colonel Cody. It was the writer's pleasure to come into
close contact with Cody during the early years of his experimental work
with man-lifting box-kites at the Alexandra Park, London, and never will
his genial smile and twinkling eye be forgotten.
Cody always seemed ready to crack a joke with anyone, and possibly there
was no more optimistic man in the whole of Britain. To the boys and
girls of Wood Green he was a popular hero. He was usually clad in a
"cowboy" hat, red flannel shirt, and buckskin breeches, and his hair
hung down to his shoulders. On certain occasions he would give a "Wild
West" exhibition at the Alexandra Palace, and one of his most daring
tricks with the gun was to shoot a cigarette from a lady's lips. One
could see that he was entire master of the rifle, and a trick which
always brought rounds of applause was the hitting of a target while
standing with his back to it, simply by the aid of a mirror held at the
butt of his rifle.
But it is of Cody as an aviator and aeroplane constructor that we
wish to speak. For some reason or other he was generally the object of
ridicule, both in the Press and among the public. Why this should have
been so is not quite clear; possibly his quaint attire had something
to do with it, and unfriendly critics frequently raised a laugh at his
expense over the enormous size of his machines. So large were they
that the Cody biplane was laughingly called the "Cody bus" or the "Cody
Cathedral."
But in the end Cody fought down ridicule and won fame, for in
competition with some of the finest machines of the day, piloted by
some of our most expert airmen, he won the prize of L5000 offered by the
Government in 1912 in connection with the Army trials for aeroplanes.
In these trials he astonished everyone by obtaining a speed of over 70
miles an hour in his biplane, which weighed 2600 pounds.
In the opening years of the present century Cody spent much time in
demonstrations with huge box-kites, and for a time this form of kite was
highly popular with boys of North London. In these kites he made over
two hundred flights, reaching, on some occasions, an altitude of over
2000 feet. At all times of the day he could have been seen on the slopes
of the Palace Hill, hauling these strange-looking, bat-like objects
backward and forward in the wind. Reports of his experiments appeared
in the Press, but Cody was generally looked upon as a "crank". The
War Office, however, saw great possibilities in the kites for scouting
purposes in time of war, and they paid Cody L5000 for his invention.
It is a rather romantic story of how Cody came to take up experimental
work with kites, and it is repeated as it was given by a Mohawk chief to
a newspaper representative.
"On one occasion when Cody was in a Lancashire town with his Wild West
show, his son Leon went into the street with a parrot-shaped kite. Leon
was attired in a red shirt, cowboy trousers, and sombrero, and soon a
crowd of youngsters in clogs was clattering after him.
"'If a boy can interest a crowd with a little kite, why can't a man
interest a whole nation?' thought Cody--and so the idea of man-lifting
kites developed."
In 1903 Cody made a daring but unsuccessful attempt to cross the Channel
in a boat drawn by two kites. Had he succeeded he intended to cross the
Atlantic by similar means.
Later on, Cody turned his attention to the construction of aeroplanes,
but he was seriously handicapped by lack of funds. His machines
were built with the most primitive tools, and some of our modern
constructors, working in well-equipped "shops", where the machinery is
run by electric plant, would marvel at the work accomplished with such
tools as those used by Cody.
Most of Cody's flights were made on Laffan's Plain, and he took part in
the great "Round Britain" race in 1911. It was characteristic of the
man that in this race he kept on far in the wake of MM. Beaumont and
Vedrines, though he knew that he had not the slightest chance of winning
the prize; and, days after the successful pilot had arrived back at
Brooklands, Cody's "bus" came to earth in the aerodrome. "It's dogged as
does it," he remarked, "and I meant to do the course, even if I took a
year over it."
Of Cody's sad death at Farnborough, when practising in the ill-fated
water-plane which he intended to pilot in the sea flight round Great
Britain in 1913, we speak in a later chapter.