Who knew there is a huge California connection with the early history of aviation? Local Craig S. Harwood, engineering geologist related to John J. Montgomery, knew. He and Gary B. Fogel wrote, “Quest for Flight: John J. Montgomery and the Dawn of Aviation in the West.”
Sylvia Lee, co-president of The Scotts Valley Friends of the Library, introduced Harwood on March 19 to a roomful of interested listeners at the library. Explaining that it took him eight years to research the subject and to write the book, Harwood said that most of the research was done at various public libraries.
“Public libraries are a great source of original material,” he said, later donating 50% of the proceeds of the sale of his books at the event to The Friends of the Scotts Valley Library in appreciation.
John J. Montgomery, born in 1858 in Yuba City, was an American inventor, physicist, engineer, and professor at Santa Clara College, and is known for his invention of controlled heavier-than-air flying machines. As a little boy, he attended the 1869 San Francisco Bay Air Ship Exhibit and became hooked on airships. At the time there was great interest in flying balloons and airships.
The family moved to Southern California and in 1884 Montgomery built a glider which he flew up to 600 feet in the San Diego area. He kept building gliders, crashing them and building them anew. Locally, he flew his air ships at Manresa Beach, Aptos, Santa Cruz, and the Santa Clara Valley. There is a commemorative marker at Seascape in Aptos.
In 1893 at the International Conference on Aerial Navigation at the Chicago World’s Fair, he presented a lecture about his experimental flights. Harwood said historians consider Montgomery’s flight experiments of the 1880s to be the first controlled flights of a machine in the Western Hemisphere.
History has a way of recognizing some people and overlooking others. The Wright Brothers flew their airplane in 1908 but Harwood and Fogel have proven that Montgomery was ahead of them.
He died on October 31, 1911 at age 53 due to a gliding accident in Evergreen, California.
There are memorials at Otay Mesa and Montgomery Hill, San Jose, near Evergreen Valley College. Several other memorials and sculptures are located in San Jose, San Francisco and San Diego.
“Quest for Flight: John J. Montgomery and the Dawn of Aviation in the West,” published in 2012, received the Great Southwest Book Regional History Award in 2014 and the PIP Award 2014.
