With this concept Caldwell founded the "Gray Goose Airways" to raise capital to build his ornithopter and incorporated the firm under Nevada laws in 1928, with the first shares of stock being sold in Denver that year. Power for the flapping action was to be provided by the pilot, who would need to be highly athletic, to say the least. These wings were equipped with dozens of flexible fabric valves which were supposed to open on the upstroke and close on the downstroke. The Cyclogyro patent was granted in the summer of 1927, but by the end of that year Caldwell, now living in Denver, filed another patent on an even more impractical human-powered, flapping-wing aircraft, or "ornithopter." This contraption looked like a rowboat with birdlike wings. The plane's "wings" were actually small airfoil blades mounted in Ferris wheel-like rotating frames protruding from either side of a conventional aircraft fuselage. In February 1923, while living in Santa Monica, California, he filed an application for a patent covering a rather bizarre aircraft - a so-called "Cyclogyro"- which was designed to take off vertically and transition to forward flight. In the 1920s, according to statements he made later in life, Caldwell became interested in aviation and began to study the fundamentals of aerodynamics, gleaning scraps of knowledge from textbooks and encyclopedias. He attended Oregon State College, Corvallis, from 1912 to 1913, majoring in mechanical engineering. According to his college records, Caldwell was born in the small town of Hensall, Ontario, Canada in 1883. Jonathan Edward Caldwell was something of a mystery even to his close relatives, and his strange career can only be reconstructed in spotty form through newspaper clippings, patent documents and newsreel scripts. landed on its inventor, but didn't kill him. On its first flight the contraption connected to the motorcycle, set the heavily-braced wings into a flapping frenzy, but before it got any serious ideas about flying, the tail broke off. This item is hand signed by the company's officers including Jonathan Edward Caldwell and is over 73 years old.Ĭertificate Vignette Gray Goose Airways supposedly developed a flying machine that flapped its wings like a goose. This historic document has an ornate border around it with a vignette of a Canadian honker at left with Gray Goose Airways logo on the body of the goose. Beautifully engraved Certificate from the The Gray Goose Airways, Inc.
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