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Queen of the Air
March 11, 2018
The Wright Brothers were long codified as achieving the first powered flight, in 1903. Maybe. Other flying machines claim to have flown earlier, and the “Queen of the Air” may be the earliest. It’s clearly the most improbable. It has no wings or propellers, and looks like a cross between a diving bell and a gas chamber.
It was built in 1860 by Ohio inventor Daniel McFarland Cook, who announced in a widely-printed newspaper letter that he would fly the Queen on a round-trip between Ohio and San Francisco in the span of 12 hours — in an era when such a trip, even by Pony Express, would have taken weeks.
Queen of the Air resembles the projectile-capsule in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, but Cook unveiled it five years before Verne’s book was published. Built of quarter-inch-thick riveted steel, its bullet shape was not meant to be fired from a cannon, but propelled by an “electric engine” of Cook’s design. He promised that it would “navigate the air at will with an inconceivable velocity.”
Cook’s subsequent silence is taken as proof that his trip was a flop, but just because nothing was said publicly doesn’t mean that the flight didn’t happen. Maybe Cook simply decided, with the Civil War brewing, that the world wasn’t a safe place for his invention.
Queen of the Air, unlike the flimsy contraptions of other early aeronauts, was built to last. After Cook’s death the airship was repurposed by less-visionary Ohio farmers into a chicken coop, a corn crib, and a smokehouse. Local historian Timothy Brian McKee tracked it down in the woods outside Mansfield in 2017, and donated it to the North Central Ohio Industrial Museum.
We spoke with museum president Jerry Miller, who said that Queen of the Air will be on display when the museum opens to the public later this year. “Mansfield is a really cool old industrial town,” Jerry said (We know! It’s the home of Elektro the Robot, among other marvels). Queen of the Air is currently in the shop having rusting parts stabilized, and when finished, said Jerry, visitors will be able to sit inside and gaze out the portholes much as Daniel McFarland Cook must have done.
No flights are expected, unless someone can track down Cook’s mysterious motor.
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