Gustave Whitehead
Gustave Whitehead was born in Leutershausen, Bavaria, Germany on January 1st, 1874 and is the Pilot. At the age of 53, Gustave Whitehead biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
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In addition to his work on flying machines, Whitehead built engines. In 1904, he attended the St. Louis World's Fair and displayed an aeronautical motor. Air Enthusiast wrote: "Weisskopf's ability and mechanical skill could have made him a wealthy man at a time when there was an ever-increasing demand for lightweight engines, but he was far more interested in flying." Instead, Whitehead only accepted enough engine orders to sustain aviation experiments.
His aeronautical work was described in a chapter titled "The Conquest of the Air" in a 1904 book, Modern Industrial Progress, by Charles Henry Cochrane. The book said Whitehead had experimented with a "three-deck machine" and attached a 12 hp motor driving a tractor propeller after tests showed the craft could carry more than his weight. Test of the machine were described as "sufficiently satisfactory that another is being built."
In 1908, Whitehead designed and built a 75 hp lightweight two-cycle motor at the suggestion of aviation pioneer George A. Lawrence, who was having difficulty obtaining an aeronautic engine. The water-cooled machine was designed so that functional cylinders continued to work if others failed, a safety factor to help avoid accidents due to engine failure. The men formed Whitehead Motor Works with an office in New York City and a factory in Bridgeport, Connecticut, that built motors in three sizes: 25, 40 and 75 hp, weighing 95, 145 and 200 pounds respectively.
Whitehead's business practices were unsophisticated and he was sued by a customer, resulting in a threat that his tools and equipment would be seized. He hid his engines and most of his tools in a neighbor's cellar and continued his aviation work. One of his engines was installed by aviation pioneer Charles Wittemann in a helicopter built by Lee Burridge of the Aero Club of America, but the craft failed to fly.
Whitehead's own 1911 studies of the vertical flight problem resulted in a 60-bladed helicopter, which, unmanned, lifted itself off the ground.
He lost an eye in a factory accident and also suffered a severe blow to the chest from a piece of factory equipment, an injury that may have led to increasing attacks of angina. Despite these setbacks, he exhibited an aircraft at Hempstead, New York, as late as 1915. He continued to work and invent. He designed a braking safety device, hoping to win a prize offered by a railroad. He demonstrated it as a scale model but won nothing. He constructed an "automatic" concrete-laying machine, which he used to help build a road north of Bridgeport. These inventions brought him no more profit than did his airplanes and engines. Around 1915 Whitehead worked in a factory as a laborer and repaired motors to support his family.
He died of a heart attack, on 10 October 1927, after attempting to lift an engine out of a car he was repairing. He stumbled onto his front porch and into his home, then collapsed dead in the house.