If Mosquito Hawks Can Fly

0:00So much activity is required to keep a business running smoothly behind the scenes. And connectivity is the key to it all. AT &T Business is built for exactly that. Helping small businesses stay connected with reliability they can count on. For small business owners, connectivity is not just a convenience. It's essential. It keeps operations moving, teams aligned, and customers supported. It can be the difference between everything running seamlessly in the background or becoming the thing that brings work to a halt. AT &T Business Internet is designed to be a reliable provider, helping reduce friction and keep things running smoothly so businesses can stay focused on what matters most.

0:40Powered by AT &T Business. Built to work. Get AT &T Business at business.att.com. Confidence. It's listening to your gut. It's moving forward even when the path ahead is unclear. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has helped people keep their promises, building confidence for generations. Whether you're confident in your financial future or just beginning to envision it, we're here to help. Ask a financial professional how. Pacific Life, the power of a promise. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska. And in New York, Pacific Life & Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. This is 99 % Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

1:25All families tell stories about themselves. Those stories are passed down, and like an intergenerational game of telephone, the details sometimes change from fact to fiction. I was always told that my grandpa sold Elvis his first guitar. My family did live in Memphis at the time. The family business was tuning pianos and selling instruments, so it is possible. But every member of my family was an unabashed fabulist, So who knows? If you've ever wondered how much of your family lore is actually true, then I have a podcast for you. And what's especially great about it is that one of the people who works on it is from our 99PI family, Katie Mingle.

2:08Family Lore is a weekly narrative podcast that celebrates and investigates the stories families tell to themselves about themselves. It is really great. Here is an episode of Family Lore with host Lloyd Lockridge.

2:36You might remember back in 1999, the United States Mint started producing specialty quarters. On the back of each quarter, instead of an eagle spreading its wings and looking off to the side, you'd see a unique design representing any given state. For example, on the back of the Massachusetts Quarter, you'd have a minute man. The Virginia Quarter featured ships arriving at Jamestown in 1607. And on the back of the North Carolina Quarter, you had a man lying prostrate on a primitive airplane with another man watching from below. This, of course, was a depiction of the Wright Brothers and their inaugural flight at the small beach town of Kitty Hawk.

3:13At the top of the coin is the inscription, First Flight. This is a story that virtually all Americans know. The Ride Brothers were the first to fly. The Ride Brothers invented the airplane. Or at the very least, the Ride Brothers were pioneers in the field of aviation. But there's another story you probably haven't heard that makes the origins of American aviation a little more complex. I'm Lloyd Lockridge, and this is Family Lore.

3:50This story begins in Louisiana, a state not known for aviation. Quite the opposite, really. With its bayous, swamps, labyrinthine coastline, and the nation's biggest river, the state is known for its boats. Cajun pirogues, flat-bottom airboats, paddle steamers, the Higgins boat. But the Louisiana man at the center of this episode's family lore was not interested in boats. He was not interested in navigating the water. Before the advent of airplanes, this man dreamed of navigating the sky. His name was Charles Frederick Page. And to hear his story, we have traveled to Alexandria, Louisiana in person to speak with one of his descendants, Charles Frederick Page's grandson.

4:33So let's just get started. Could you tell me your name, please? Joseph P. Page. Joseph Page is 87 years old. He's a veteran of the United States Air Force, and his military background shows. His house is tidier than a nuclear submarine. And Mr. Page stands with a certain posture, one that conveys not only physical strength, but a kind of strength of character. He's the kind of person who, without saying a word, makes you want to take your hat off when you walk inside. We were greeted by him and his wife of 65 years. We sat down in his living room and immediately launched into a conversation about his early life.

5:11Well, I grew up on Highway 20 East in Pineville. So we lived in a country and about 100 yards away. Joseph came of age in 1950s Louisiana, an overtly and unapologetically racist environment. Despite living in Pineville, he had to commute across the Red River to Alexandria in order to attend the only all-black school in the area. And to add insult to injury, even if he were the first person at the municipal bus stop, he'd have to wait for all the white passengers to board first, only to pass them all on his way to the back of the bus. And dignities like that were a part of daily life. And this kind of blatant discrimination was a confusing experience for young Joseph Page.

5:52Because his neighbors out in the country were white. And he'd play with his neighbors all the time. But if they saw each other in the town of Alexandria, they'd have to pretend like they didn't know each other. I didn't quite understand it as a child. In my mind, I knew it was not right as to why we could be friends and hang out together in the country. when nobody was around, but we could not associate with each other when we were in Alexandria. And as a child, you remember thinking, this doesn't make any sense. Yeah, I did. Something was wrong. I couldn't exactly put my hands on it. But by the time I got to junior high school, I knew for a fact it was wrong.

6:34And I recognized it as discrimination. Joseph was grappling with these issues in the midst of a national reckoning. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was on the horizon, and the movement for racial equality was gaining momentum. But Joseph had no illusions about the reality of his situation. Despite the promises of civil rights, Joseph's parents told him that he'd need to work twice as hard as white people to achieve the same results. And this was not some abstract lesson. It was inextricably connected to the story of the family's patriarch, Joseph's grandfather, Charles Frederick Page. Charles Page was born in 1864 in Rapides Parish, Louisiana.

7:14He was born into slavery, which means that Joseph Page's grandfather, not his great-great-grandfather or some distant relative, but his grandfather was, at one point, enslaved. I should have told my grandchildren now to underscore the point of slavery was not that long ago. Think about that. So tell me one of the first things you remember learning about your grandfather, Charles Frederick Page. Well, my parents and my aunts and uncles always talked about it. When I was a small kid, he was a bigger-than-life figure in my mind as a kid. They always told us about inventing the first airship. In case you didn't catch that, Joseph said that he was always told that his grandfather invented the first airship.

8:04And we would go, as school kids would do, we would go to school in elementary school and say, my grandfather built the first airship. And the other kids would laugh at us and say, you know, that's not right. The Wright brothers built the first airplane. So as a kid, you don't want to be embarrassed by your friends, right? So you stop talking about it. This claim that Charles Frederick Page invented an airship prior to the Wright brothers inventing the airplane, this was a strong piece of Page family lore. It's something the family believes to be true. But a lot of people outside the family are skeptical at best.

8:40Those who knew Charles Page respected him, but for other reasons. He was a renaissance man. He was a timberman, a cobbler, a botanical farmer. He established a cemetery for the black community in Pineville, the first of its kind, the Lincoln Cemetery. He had a vision for diversified farming, where a tenant farmer could slowly gain equity in the land he was working. But what a lot of his peers didn't know is that he also had a mind for engineering. He would have been a great engineer. What my grandmother used to complain about when she would tell my grandfather she needed a new chicken coop. He needed to build her a new chicken coop.

9:16He would get out the ruler and a pencil and paper and he would design it and he would do all this stuff. All I need is a simple chicken coop. It did not have to be like perfect, you know. But Charles Page had bigger ambitions than state-of-the-art chicken coops. And one evening, while sitting on his porch, he got an idea from an unlikely contributor, the mosquito hawk. Those big, gangly, slow-moving, mosquito-looking insects that you tend to see in the spring and fall. The story I heard repeatedly was that he would sit on his porch in the evenings and watch the flight of those mosquito hawks. and that inspired him to figure out how he could duplicate that and fly himself and figure out how to do that.

10:08And in the ensuing weeks, months, or even years, nobody knows for sure, Charles Page worked on a way to fly. And he had a deadline. He needed to design and build something in time for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, which was held in St. Louis, Missouri. You might not have heard of this event before, but it was a huge deal. The exposition lasted seven months. It dominated the newspapers. It doubled as the location of the 1904 Olympics. It saw 19 million visitors who feasted their eyes on the most cutting-edge inventions from around the world. And there were competitions for various categories.

10:45For example, the person with the greatest achievement in aviation would walk away with a$100 ,000 prize, about$3.5 million in today's money. Well, the Page family has always maintained that prior to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, Charles completed designs of his airship. But that's not all. They say he also used his self-taught construction and engineering skills to build a workable, full-size airship. The Page family doesn't know how long it took Charles Page to build the ship, or how exactly he procured all the necessary materials. But, according to the family, the vessel was built.

11:24And after it was built, Charles Page signed up for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition and made arrangements to transport the ship. In those days, the fastest way of getting something that big to a city 600 miles away was to put it on a freight train. Obviously, he could not ride on a freight train with the ship. So he had it put on the train, thinking that it would arrive in St. Louis, and at some point he would arrive there. But after parting ways with his airship, he got word that it never arrived in St. Louis. He received no explanation, All he was told is that his invention was not received at its destination.

12:02Why didn't it arrive in St. Louis? What happened to it? And of course, speculation says it was lost. How can you lose something that big? I mean, it's not like a matchbox. You know, this is a full-scale model that he built to put on that train. So how do you lose something that big? You can only speculate that it was stolen or destroyed, or it was taken by somebody and examined for its mechanical or engineering configurations. Whether the ship was stolen, destroyed, or somehow spontaneously flew off into the sunset on its own, the invention was never seen again. And, according to his descendants, Charles Page never built another one.

12:54We're not sure why. Perhaps he wanted to, but couldn't dedicate the time and resources while trying to support 11 kids. Inventing the airplane was a side gig. His main focus was to take care of his family. He was a timberman and a farmer. He was a good enough timberman to look at a tree and determine how many feet of lumber he would get out of that tree. And in addition to being a timberman, Page was remembered by his friends and family as a community leader. In 1911, there were threats of race riots when a black man murdered a white man in Pineville. Charles Page helped lead a meeting to unite the community, expressing deep regret for the death of the victim, condemning all violence, and pledging to bring the guilty party to justice.

13:39And thanks to Charles Page, cooler heads prevailed. His daughter Eva once said in an interview, he always thought people were more important than airships. Charles Page passed away in 1937 at 73 years old. His obituary describes him as a deep thinker who had many visions which he attempted to put into execution. But the extent of those visions was known to very few outside the Page family in the black community in Alexandria and Pineville. By and large, his contributions to aviation were not recognized, and many who were aware of the story simply didn't believe it. Over the years, Joseph Page and his family have tried to raise awareness, but at some point, If people don't believe you and you don't have much in the way of hard proof, what more can you do?

14:27Well, there in Alexandria, just a few miles away from Joseph's home, was a local history buff who specialized in setting the record straight. And this guy had just stumbled upon an old, forgotten article about someone he'd never heard of. So I looked at this story. It starts talking about him exhibiting at the Louisiana Purchase World's Fair in St. Louis, or attempting to, and patenting an airplane. I said, oh my God.

14:58Easily my favorite part about this job is traveling to unfamiliar places and talking to strangers. Even if the interview doesn't go well. And some of them haven't, trust me. As it turns out, cops don't love it when you ask them a thousand questions about why they couldn't solve a murder. But one thing I've learned over the years is if the person you're talking to walks out of their house to greet you, rather than waiting for you to come to the door, it means the interview is going to go just fine. And that's how we were greeted by Michael Wynn. My name is Michael Wynn, and I guess these days I'm the unofficial historian for Central Louisiana.

15:36After a long career in law enforcement, Michael spends most of his free time researching local history. But his passion for recording history didn't start with central Louisiana. As a teenager, Michael developed an obsession with interviewing older relatives. I love when I hear somebody says, I have a boring family history. I don't know. I don't know. They didn't do anything. I say it's because you don't know anything about your history. Everybody has a story. No matter what you think, everybody has a story if you're willing to listen to them. And I came up with what I felt was perfect history books on my family.

16:14And I'm very, very proud of them. But then after I published them, I realized what's next. So Michael decided to just zoom out a tad. He'd recorded his family history. Now how about his community's history? He was under the impression at the time that the history of central Louisiana was pretty well written. But still, he decided to take a look. And I remember reading in the Chamber of Commerce magazine, they had this did you know section. And one of the things in the did you know section was John Wesley Harden, the West's greatest criminal, was housed in the Alexandria City Jail. Well, what was he in jail for?

16:53So Michael did a little research. He called a John Wesley Harden biographer out in California who had written several books on the guy and asked him if he knew why Harden was arrested in Alexandria, Louisiana. He starts laughing at me. He was never in that Louisiana. I know almost his day-to-day movement. He was never in Louisiana. What the hell do y 'all have over there? And I realized the first story I hit that I wanted to write more about, I'm debunking. And so Michael's first encounter with Central Louisiana history sort of recalibrated his mission. He wasn't really writing Central Louisiana history.

17:30He was correcting it. So Michael kept digging in the local archives, looking for other peculiar stories. And I see this mention in 1906, an interview with a black man. Now, let me back up a little bit. African Americans have always been treated poorly, were particularly treated poorly back then, and were particularly treated poorly in central Louisiana. I have basically never seen an interview before 1920s with an African-American in a newspaper in central Louisiana. It's all white. You'd never know there was a black person in Pineville. This 1906 article was published in the Alexandria Town Talk.

18:12It was about a Pineville resident named Charles Frederick Page. Michael, a man who spent years interviewing people in central Louisiana, had never heard of him. The headline reads, Pineville Colored Man Has Invented an Airship. It goes on to say that Charles Page made an application for a patent and that it was granted to him by the federal government in April of 1906. As Michael read the article, he wondered, how have I never heard of this? I searched my library through history books and everything and other sources, references, vertical files. Not a damn word on this man. So Michael began digging through records, piecing together a biography of Charles Frederick Page, and trying to figure out what the deal was with this so-called airship.

18:56Charles Page was, in fact, born into slavery. He grew up in Pineville and received no formal education. But he was able to teach himself to read and write, and decipher, as they used to say in the old day, which was arithmetic. Michael then tracked down various other details, including a 1974 interview with Charles Page's daughter, Eva Page. and at some point in the 1890s according to his daughter Eva he was looking up in a mosquito hawk one day and said according to her if a mosquito hawk can fly I can fly now here is a poor man working a farm with a gigantic family in a very depressive community and he decides He wants to build himself an airship, something that did not exist.

19:47And here is this man saying, I'm going to do it. Ava Page also had the original patent papers, including the approved design for the airship, which have since been scanned and shared with us. The design drawings for this airship are truly a magical sight. It looks like something out of the Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus or Peter Pan or something. The whole of the ship is made out of wire, with an oiled canvas stretched over the wire like a drum. Then bursting out of the ship are two enormous balloons, or gas bags, which are powered by an intricate system of pumps, valves, and pistons. On the back of the ship is a propeller and a rudder.

20:25I'm not sure how to put this, but even on the page, this black-and-white, two-dimensional drawing of an airship appears to be flying. The text on the patent says that Charles F. Page of Pineville, Louisiana, has quote, invented certain new and useful improvements to airships, and then proceeds with a long, meticulously detailed description of how the airship works. And in the interview, Ava Page says the same thing we heard from Joseph Page, that Charles Page built a full-sized airship and he entered the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, which offered at least$100 ,000 in prizes for aviation.

21:00So he shipped his airship on a freight train, and for reasons that were never known, the airship did not make it. And this is where the mystery occurs, and we have to rely on family stories. The ship never made it there. And the only thing I can think is the massive prejudice of the time. Somebody stole it and destroyed it. And that's what the family says. I see no other reasonable alternative. The train didn't wreck along the way. And I think because of this disaster, the loss of his airplane, he had a major investment in this. I think he lost heart in it, and he gave up on it. I wanted to know how things might have gone if Charles Page and his airship had arrived at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.

21:48So I did some research, and this thing was a spectacle. So the main airship competition was actually a race. The favorite to win the race was a fabulously wealthy Brazilian man named Alberto Santos Dumont, a.k.a. the Wizard of the Air. It's unclear to me if that nickname was given to Santos Dumont or if he gave it to himself. In any case, Santos Dumont had already flaunted his airship at an exhibition in Paris. He arrived in St. Louis to a crush of reporters and fans clamoring to see the man who had reportedly flown. You're probably picturing a small man in a suit with a mustache and a bowler hat, and that's exactly right.

22:21That's exactly what he looks like. Leaning into his penchant for drama and flair, Santos Dumont told the St. Louis dispatch, If the world's fair accomplishes nothing more for science than to stimulate the conquest of air by man, it will have served a noble purpose. Dumont's main competition was a man from California, also wealthy, named Tom Baldwin, who had designed an airship he called the Aero. It's worth mentioning that none of these airships look like Charles Page's airship. They have oblong cigar-shaped balloons with skimpy metal scaffolding that converge on a tiny seat for the pilot beneath the balloon.

22:55And somewhere in there you'll find a propeller and a rudder. It's more of a guidable blimp than an airship. And the competition itself was very eventful. After testing his airship, Tom Baldwin, the Californian, was attempting to tie down the vessel when the crew lost control of the ropes. The airship took flight without a pilot and was discovered days later in a field miles away. But despite this one blunder, Baldwin's airship was making very impressive test runs around the exposition's grounds. Baldwin appeared to be a real contender. And that's when scandal struck. In the middle of the night, leading up to the much-anticipated airship race, someone had gone into Alberto Santos Dumont's hangar and slashed his balloons with a knife.

23:35At first, the detective assigned to the case suspected it was someone hired by a competitor, but the hangar was heavily guarded. The detective ultimately deduced that nobody could have slashed the balloons but Santos Dumont himself. But why? Because Santos Dumont feared losing the competition and couldn't tolerate the embarrassment. it. Santos Dumont was outraged by the accusation. He left in a huff, taking his torn-up balloons back to Paris for repair, vowing to return to St. Louis to prove his aeronautical prowess. When the airship race finally took place in December of 1904, Santos Dumont had not returned.

24:10And of the remaining contestants, nobody was able to complete the course. The$100 ,000 prize was left on the table. But just take a second to imagine how surprised these well-heeled, swashbuckling pioneers of the sky would have been by the arrival of Charles Frederick Page A black man with no formal education, very little money, and an airship that, in my personal opinion, is far more elegant than anything else on display Would Charles Page of Pineville, Louisiana have beaten the likes of Captain Thomas Baldwin or another contestant named Count Henry de la Vaux We'll never know. Charles Page never made it to St.

24:51Louis, and neither did his airship. However, on April 10, 1906, two years after the Winterless Louisiana Purchase Exposition, Page's airship patent was formally approved by the United States government. Now, what's fascinating is the timing. That was the 1904 World's Fair. It took three years for his patent to go through. It also took the Wright brothers three years for their patent to go through. Charles Frederick Page's patent for his airship, his controllable vehicle for the sky, beats the Wright brothers by one month in being issued. He gets a patent one month before the Wright brothers. Oh my God.

25:36Now these are different devices. One is an airship and the other is an airplane, one heavier than air, one lighter than air. But still, the fact that Charles Page got his patent for a flying vessel before the vaunted Wright brothers is pretty remarkable. We will probably never be able to prove that Charles Page built and flew his airship, and we'll probably never find out why it didn't make it to St. Louis. And maybe most mysterious of all, we may never know why Charles Page stopped pursuing his airship. Because even if there wasn't a physical ship, people were very interested in his patent. Michael Wynn was able to recover three pieces of original correspondence regarding Charles Page.

26:15Less than three weeks after Page's patent was approved, he received a letter from a businessman in Pennsylvania named C.G. Crispin asking if the patent was for sale. Then, a couple weeks later, C.G. Crispin wrote another letter, and this time he had a lot more to say. Crispin writes, quote, we have investigated your patent very thoroughly, and our judgment is it ought to sell for$30 ,000. This airship easily excels anything also in its line that is on the market today. And the third piece of correspondence was between Page and someone else. All we have for that third person is an envelope with a return address.