On this Day: Karl Jatho Claims to Take First Manned, Motorized Flight

An inventor, public servant and performer, Karl Jatho began testing his own flying machine in early August of 1903, moving from a three-winged design to two, basing his initial approach on a Zanonia seed.

In front of a crowd of four witnesses outside of the city of Hanover, Jatho used a simple 10 hp motor to elevate his machine, traveling 200 feet at a height of about 10 feet.

By comparison, the Wright brothers would travel a distance of 120 feet four months later, followed by an 852-foot attempt later that same day.

Equipped with flat wings, compared to the Wright brothers’ curved design, Jatho’s effort would have marked the first time a manned motorized flying machine had taken flight.

With the exception of interviews with the four witnesses, now stored at the Hannover Airport, no record of Jatho’s attempt remains. However, sketches, accounts and photos do still exist of Jatho’s later effort, using an enhanced version of his original machine, launched in November of the same year, preceding Orville and Wilbur’s effort by a month.

Though Jatho’s claim has been championed by many as the true first flight, attributing the Wright Brothers place in history to an American bias, it is worth noting that a number of inventors claimed a similar feat, dating back to the efforts of Sir Hiram Maxim in 1894.

Though a source of contention among aviation historians, this is hardly the first time great inventions or ideas have emerged around the same time, miles, if not continents apart. In a recent article for The New Yorker magazine, Malcolm Gladwell found numerous famous inventions and ideas that seemed to emerge from different minds, in different locations, without any obvious connection between the two. Dubbed “Multiples,” these serendipitous events include the theory of evolution, calculus and possibly even the telephone, among many others.

The common factor among all of these events is that one mind, due to location, connections or simple good luck, is remembered as the true inventor. In the case of the airplane, Orville and Wilbur Wright are celebrated as the driving creative force behind man’s first motorized flight, while Jatho is a mystery to anyone ho has not bothered to look.

Though he was eventually recognized as a hero in his native Germany and continued in the aviation field, achieving sustained flight in one of his machines in 1909, Jatho’s passing in 1933 earned little mention abroad with Time magazine qualifying his claim with the word “allegedly.”

However, years later, a group of determined proponents of Jatho’s claim set out to prove not only that they could recreate their hero’s machine, but prove that his design would in fact work.

Subtitling their project “We were the first,” the group rebuilt Jatho’s machine from the ground up, pulling it onto the runway at the Hannover Airport. While the project’s Web site provides no shortage of images of the recreation, any reports of success remain a mystery. The site has been inactive since 2006.