In 1878, 25 years before the Wright brothers, a 96-pound machinist pedaled a hand-cranked airship over the Connecticut River — and its inventor still died penniless.
Charles F. Ritchel was a Connecticut inventor who eventually held more than 150 patents, on everything from bolt-threading machines to the funhouse mirror. In the 1870s he built something stranger: a one-man dirigible with no engine at all. A light brass frame hung beneath a cylindrical rubberized gas bag, filled with hydrogen and built by Goodyear, and the pilot sat as if on a bicycle, spinning a propeller with a hand crank and swiveling it to steer. He first flew it indoors, inside an exhibition hall at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.
Because the whole machine ran on human muscle, the pilot had to be almost weightless. Ritchel was too heavy to fly it himself. The flights were made instead by Mark Quinlan, a machinist who weighed about 96 pounds.
On June 12, 1878, before a large crowd on a ballfield behind the Colt firearms factory in Hartford, Quinlan took the craft up about 200 feet, steered it over the armory and out above the Connecticut River, turned it around, and brought it back to land near where he had started. It is remembered as the first controlled round-trip flight of a piloted aircraft in America, and it put Ritchel's machine on the cover of Harper's Weekly.
The next day exposed the machine's fatal flaw. Quinlan went up again, the wind rose, and the airship was simply carried away, coming down miles off course in Newington. A muscle-powered lighter-than-air craft was helpless against anything more than a light breeze.
One demonstration nearly killed its pilot. During a July 4 flight near Boston the craft malfunctioned and shot upward to roughly 3,000 feet with Quinlan aboard. He made repairs in mid-air with a pocketknife and finally landed about 44 miles away, more than an hour later.
Ritchel built and sold five of the machines, toured with circuses, and gave rides at Brighton Beach near Coney Island. He talked of a transcontinental airline flown by enormous dirigibles cranked by 11-man crews, and actually began work on an 11-man version. It never flew.
Powered flight raced past him. France's engine-driven airship La France flew in 1884, gasoline engines and Zeppelins followed, and the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Ritchel, once internationally famous, was largely forgotten, and he died of pneumonia in 1911, destitute, at the age of 66.