Scenes of Yesteryear-Lighter than air traffic comes to Dunn County

Give the guy credit, Leonardo da Vinci knew man was going to fly someday. He even designed what historians believe was his version of today’s helicopter. Lucky for him, he was so busy designing, inventing, and painting such masterpieces as “The Last Supper”, that he never tried to “fly” any of his designs of flying machines

That was back in the days when the calendar revealed the days of the 1400s, or early 1500s, but for the next four centuries or so before anyone found a way to “fly”. There came the industrial revolution and it wasn’t long before someone thought of a hot air or a gas-propelled balloon. That satisfied a few early experimenters, and with the developing a flying machine becoming a certainly, the only balloon travel was relegated to public festivals, occasions such as the Dunn County Free Fair in Menomonie.

In those early years the county fair was a three-day exposition of farm crops, vegetables, animals with capable judges selecting the “the cream of the crop”, a traveling carnival featuring a few rides such as the omnipresent merry-go-round*, perhaps a ferris wheel, and a handful of tent “shows” featuring such attractions as “Myra, the two-headed lady! She walks, she talks!”. Later that night, when the crowd had dispersed, one could see “Myra” cruising the grounds without that extra head!

And then there was the afternoon grandstand show, that, in 1909, featured the “death- defying” performance of Jack Cosgrove who hooked himself to the open end of the hot air balloon, quickly shot off towards the heavens. One woman claimed that he rose ‘’so high that you couldn’t see Cosgrove’’ until he unhooked himself from the balloon to begin his plunge earthward.

I wasn’t there then, but it was often a common stunt for the daring jumper to open a bag of flour to emit a cloud of the white “stuff” to mark his free fall from the balloon. When the flour was gone he pulled his parachute’s rip cord. That action stopped the free-fall of Mr. Cosgrove, and if the wind was right, and if he knew what he was doing, he could carefully maneuver his fall so he could land in front of the grandstand before a cheering and a much relieved crowd.

And by then there was someone with a car racing off in the hope of finding and retrieving the deflated balloon that would be needed for the next day’s show. There must have been a “spare” if it was lost. It was a very popular performance and the forerunner of what was to come, the appearance, two years later, of one of those newfangled airplanes that were coming fast into the world, and local scene.

So when the county fair board began to plan for the annual fair that was scheduled to begin on September 13, 1911, it was clear to them that an aviation event would pack the fairgrounds. They wasted little time in contacting popular barnstorming exhibition pilot, Harry Powers, to appear at the fair with his Curtiss airplane. But shortly after Powers agreed to appear, he had to cancel because he had been injured when he had crashed his Curtiss at another fair. Immediately the fair board looked for a replacement for the air flight attraction, and signed a Frenchman, Rene Simon, who had recently crashed his plane, a Bleriot, into Lake Michigan, but uninjured, had signed with a rival plane producer, John Moisant, the inventor of the Moisant plane.

In his book, Forward in Flight, The History of Aviation in Wisconsin, Michael Goc , writes that the Moisant plane “featured a single wing and tail, a fabric-covered fuselage, a front-engine mount, and a half cockpit for the pilot. Although the more stable biplanes would continue to dominate aircraft design until after World War I, the French ‘Monocoques for the prewar years presented a view of the future.”

It was on Wednesday, September 13, 1911, in Menomonie, “where a record crowd of 12,000 people came to the fairgrounds to watch Rene Simon circle the racetrack three times swing out over Red Cedar Lake [Lake Menomin], then return to make a precision landing in the infield, The pilot had planned to touch ground only briefly at the end of his flight and take off again, but as soon as he landed, the crowd rushed out onto the field and mobbed the machine.

“For his own safety and that of the crowd, Simon switched off his engine and as quickly as possible rolled the plane into a tent. Hiding the machine in the tent meant that only paying customers could view the plane up close and, while there, listen to the lecturer who explained its construction. The tent also protected the machine from the overly curious who, accidentally or not, might scrape the “dope” or poke holes in the fabric of the machine.

“Simon is a pilot who is known to be a stranger to fear.” wrote a satisfied reporter for the Dunn County News. The ”Master of aerial navigation” had done his job well. He planned to make two more flights the following day in Menomonie before leaving the state with the first monoplane to fly in Wisconsin”.

That claim was backed by an unknown source who stated that Simon’s “seven minute flight on September 13, gave Menomonie the right to claim, “the honor of having carried out the first ascent of a heavier-than-air machine in Northwest Wisconsin and probably the first by a monoplane in the entire state.”

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An unidentified photographer snapped his view of the balloon about ready to launch into the atmosphere, a move that would allow daredevil Jack Cosgrove to parachute to earth before an admiring crowd safely watching the stunt with its collective “feet” firmly on the ground.

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This is the model of the Moisant monoplane as it appeared in 1911 at another unnamed venue. John Mosiant, the developer of the craft, was killed a year or so later in an accident in New Orleans. That spelled the end of any further development of the plane. This picture may be one of an earlier version of the plane before fabric was applied to the body of the plane.