Detroit and Michigan were key sites for the aeronautical
innovations that led
to the modern aviation industry. William B. Stout was the first person to design
and build a successful all-metal plane. He also helped design the Ford tri-motor
plane that was the dominant craft of the late 1920s.
St. Joseph, Michigan was the site of the first powered airplane flight
in this nation. Octave Alexandre Chanute was a highly successful and prosperous
French engineer who retired to Chicago. In the mid-1890s, he devoted himself
and his funds to the development of flying craft. He hired Augustus Herring of
St. Joseph to design and build innovative gliders that they flew in wind
currents along the beaches of Lake Michigan as early as 1896.
Herring began experimenting with powered planes at this time. Fortunately, he
obtained financial backing from New York investors, and by 1898, attached a
two-cylinder compressed air engine to a glider he designed. On October 11, 1898,
he flew his
plane into a 23 mile-per-hour wind at Silver Beach in St. Joseph. Alas,
there were no witnesses. Appreciating the historic significance of his tremendous
achievement—the first in the United States to fly a powered plane—he
invited the press and flew his place a second time on October 22, 1898. Although
reporters described his flight, no one took a picture of the airborne craft.
Five
years later, the Wright Brothers replicated what Herring had done. When challenged
about their claim to be the first to fly in this country, the Wright brothers
and their defenders apparently stressed the extreme simplicity of the craft Herring
flew years before their event at Kitty Hawk. A State of Michigan Historic Marker
stands on Silver Beach in St. Joseph to commemorate this first airplane flight.
William Bushnell Stout was born in 1880 and raised near Minneapolis. By his teen
years, he was fascinated by the idea of building airplanes. He studied both engineering
and journalism at the University of Minnesota. By 1912, he was the automotive
and aviation editor of the Chicago Tribune. In 1914, he became the chief
engineer
for the Scripps-Booth Auto firm in Detroit.
In this job, he designed a cycle car that Scripps-Booth marketed; that is, a
small, very lightweight car powered by
a motorcycle-sized motor. Two years later, he became the General Sales Manager
for Packard. With the outbreak of World War I, Packard started an aviation division
with William Stout as its head. Packard co-operated with William Leland on the
development of the Liberty engine that was produced in Detroit for the war effort.
During the War, the military assembled a group of engineers to design planes,
since it was assumed that flying craft would revolutionize warfare. Stout stayed
with this group after the Armistice, and in 1919, designed a revolutionary new
plane—known as Stout’s Cootie—but military administrators did
not think it would fulfill their needs. Stout terminated his employment with
the government, moved back to Detroit and founded his own firm to built planes.
Early planes were constructed of wood and canvas in order to minimize weight.
Designers saw virtues in an all-metal plane, but found it challenging to build
a metal plane light enough for use with the engines available at that time. By
1923, William Stout—with the backing of Detroit investors—was
producing the first commercially-successful all-metal plane. This was known as
the Stout Air Sedan.
Henry Ford maintained strong interests in most many technologies. Indeed, he
presumed that he could revolutionize the railroad industry through the use of
electricity. He purchased the Detroit, Toledo and Ironton Railroad to demonstrate
how effective his new ideas were, but failed to produce much change in America’s
conservative rail industry. Indeed, he could not successful apply electric propulsion
to his own rail line.
Ford was also interested in aviation, and by 1920 or so, had sent engineers
to Europe to investigate the new planes and aviation engines built there. By
about
1923, Stout met Henry Ford and proposed that an airport be built in Dearborn.
Ford agreed and an airport was laid out on the land that is now the test track
for Ford Motor. By this time, Stout’s
firm—Stout Metal Airplane
Company—apparently won contracts to build a few planes that would carry
passengers
and freight. Shortly thereafter, Ford purchased Stout’s outfit, although
Stout remained on the payroll. Using six of Stout’s planes, Ford established
an airline in 1926 to carry freight from his Dearborn airport to Chicago. This
was the nation’s first commercial air carrier.
Henry Ford and his firm invested in building planes in the late 1920s. William
Stout played a key role in developing the Ford Tri-Motor, which was widely known
as The Tin Goose. This became the largest-selling plane in that era. A total
of 199 tri-motors were built between 1926 and 1932. They carried nine passengers
and were powered, not by Ford motors, but rather by Wright or Pratt and Whitney
engines. The first coast-to-coast air service across the US began in 1929 using
Ford tri-motors. Of course, there were many stops on those trips from the Atlantic
to the Pacific. And Franklin Roosevelt was thought to be very innovative when
he used a Ford Tri-Motor to get to his campaign sites in 1932. The first time
I flew was in the mid-1950s when I boarded a Ford Tri-Motor going from Port Clinton
to Put-In-Bay, Ohio. With the onset of the Depression, Ford apparently made the
decision not to invest in the development of aviation technology, and by the
early 1930s, Ford exited the aviation business. Ford’s Dearborn air field
closed in 1933.
Stout continued working as an automotive designed for Ford throughout the 1930s
and 1940s. He is well known among auto historians and designers for the radical
innovations he included in his 1936 Stout Scarab. It was an aerodynamic vehicle
with an all-aluminum body. Stout located the Ford flathead V-8 engine at the
rear of the car. And—anticipating the SUV’s that appeared in the
1970s—he
designed a very spacious interior and allowed individuals to reconfigure it as
they wished so they could transport many passengers or a load of goods. Alas,
only six experimental Stout Scarab’s were built, probably because he had
the misfortune of designing in the midst of the Depression.
State of Michigan Registry of Historic Sites: P25008, Listed January 19, 1957
State of Michigan Historical Markers: Erected April 18, 1959. This impressive
marker is located in front of the entrance to The Dearborn Inn.
National Register of Historic Sites: Not listed
Picture: Ren Farley
Description prepared: May, 2007