Biographical Sketches

JOHN JOSEPH MONTGOMERY

Born: February 15, 1858    In: Yuba City, CA
Died: October 31, 1911    In: San Diego, CA

John Joseph Montgomery’s family moved to Oakland in 1863 when he was five years old. As a toddler he would lie on a pillow and "pretend to fly," his mother said. He watched birds, and he studied clouds, wondering if he could somehow fly by catching one. He flew kites of all shapes and sizes and drafted his brother, James, to help in crude flight experiments. At age 11 he joined a Fourth of July crowd to watch Frederick Marriott pilot a steam-propelled hydrogen balloon, then returned home to build a model of the craft.

He attended Santa Clara University when it was still a college, then transferred to St Ignatius College in San Francisco to a Masters of Science degree. In 1883 the family moved to a ranch near San Diego. His father, Zachary Montgomery, distinguished as a lawyer, journalist, and politician, took up farming and publishing a weekly newspaper. Young Montgomery, as foreman of the farm, wasted no time in setting up a workshop in the barn, complete with a lathe. His sister, Jane, pumped the bellows on a steam boiler for heat to help shape ash strips into parabolic, cambered wing ribs resembling wings of birds he had studied.

In August 1883 he and James carried the parts to a mesa on the ranch and assembled a glider with wings shaped like a gull’s. They waited until breezes picked up, then James tied a rope to the front of the craft and waited down the slope for John’s signal. He pulled the rope and ran a few steps until the glider rose. At a height of about 15’, Montgomery soared 600’ to a graceful landing. It was the world’s first controlled heavier-than-air flight, and it preceded Orville Wright’s engine-driven flight by 20 years.

"[We took my] apparatus to the top of a hill facing a gentle wind," he later described the event. "There was a little run and a jump, and I found myself launched in the air. A peculiar sensation came over me. The first feeling in placing myself at the mercy of the wind was that of fear. Immediately after came a feeling of security when I realized the solid support given by the wing surface. And that support was of a very peculiar nature. There was a cushiony softness about it, yet it was firm. When I found the machine would follow any movement in the seat for balancing, I felt I was self-buoyant..."

Montgomery’s feat and subsequent flights did receive some mention by the local press, and later experiments in the 1890s around Santa Clara were publicized, but for years he was largely unrecognized as an aviation pioneer. Even today many aviation history books still ignore him, even though a 1946 feature film, "Gallant Journey," dramatized his story, as did a 1967 biography by Arthur D Spearman, John J Montgomery: Father of Basic Flying.

He continued to study and test his theories of flight between college teaching assignments and earning a PhD from Santa Clara College in 1901. One day a circus daredevil, Daniel John Maloney, who parachuted from balloons, approached him with a plan. "I will have a balloon hoist me in your aeroplane to the 4000’ level, then I’ll cut it loose and glide to the ground." Maloney’s first flight was a 20-minute graceful descent, but a second attempt, in 1905, proved fatal when a dangling balloon release cable tangled above him and caused the glider to crash.

During this period as a mathematics teacher at St Joseph’s College, he built a wind-tunnel to experiment with wing shapes and flight controls, patented his "Improvement in Aeroplanes" in 1906, and in 1909 even built an electric typewriter and patented an alternating-current rectifier, which he sold to a San Francisco company and invested the money in aircraft designs.

During two weeks in October 1911, Montgomery had made 55 successful flights at a camp at Evergreen, near San Jose. Despite a doctor’s advice that at 53 he should stay on the ground, Montgomery wanted to make one more test flight to evaluate some changes made in his latest craft. It was a fateful decision, for soon after he became airborne the plane stalled, slipped off on a wing, and crashed. A protruding stove-bolt penetrated his brain and he died before a doctor could reach the scene.

John J Montgomery’s findings and airplane designs have earned him a well-deserved place with Octave Chanute and Samuel Pierpont Langley as American pioneers in controlled flight before the Wright brothers accomplished their Kitty Hawk milestone. ( -- adapted from "San Diego Originals" by Theodore W Fuller (California Profiles Publications 1987))

Enshrined in National Aviation Hall of Fame 1964.

Denotes an individual known to have soloed an aircraft prior to December 16, 1917, whether they were members of the "Early Birds of Aviation" Organization or not.