least once in a lifetime. For Big Jim LaMont is the man who, with a young motorcycle shopman named Glenn Curtiss, built the first Curtiss airplane in 1909 – the plane, which completed the birth of aviation.

PERFECTS LANGLEY PLANE

            It was Big Jim, who, “doing a little of this here and there,” made an ill-fated plane constructed by Dr. Samuel P. Langley also fly. Therein lies an interesting tale. Dr. Langley, you see, built his ship in 1903, before the Wright brothers made their famous flight on December 17. But the Langley plane, more powerful, never got off the ground. The plane was shipped to the Smithsonian Institution as an example of early aeronautical experimentation.

            Then, one day in 1912, Big Jim LaMont and Glenn Curtiss – having already built several flyable ships, got to speculating what had been wrong with Langley’s plane, and they arranged to have it removed from the Smithsonian. Jim tinkered here and there on the wings and tail. They took it out and tried it. The plane flew. Now the point is this: Had Jim LaMont associated with Dr. Langley in 1903 instead of Curtiss in 1909, it is quite likely Langley-LaMont and not the Wright brothers would have been credited with the first successful airplane flight.

            But, I said that Big Jim made the airplane a practical thing. He and Glenn did that with the June Bug in 1909. “It was like this,” said Big Jim, who talks at jet speed, about events at random, so rapidly the ear can hardly comprehend it, not to mention a hand trying to write it all down. ‘The Wright brothers had the patent on the wing they used. We had to try something different in order not to infringe of that patent. So I designed a straight wing –bi-wings actually. Then I added the ailerons. That is what did it. The aileron. We rigged it so the pilot could operate the ailerons from a shoulder harness.”

            Now, Jim has always claimed Curtiss should get the credit for the development, but, if you pin Jim down, and digest the records he kept, it was Jim who should get the kudos. It is a coincidence, by the way, that if you go to the Smithsonian Institution today, you will find the Langley plane and the June Bug side by side.

            As you sit and talk with Big Jim, it is a little like trying to digest everything on a smorgasbord table, in one gulp. I suppose Big Jim’s most colorful chapter, though, was when he was chief mechanic for aviatrix Ruth Law. With her daring and Jim’s steady hand with the tools, she took away the breath of millions of people in the 1920’s. Ruth’s stunts are still fantastic. Yet she always said she owed her career to Jim because he built her first plane and convinced her she could do things with it everybody else said were impossible.