Historic Snippets 

AERONAUNT EXTRODINAIRE 

The picnicker’s that arrived by train from San Francisco for a pleasant afternoon in Niles Canyon in 1902 must have been startled when a daring aeronaut brought his slowly deflating hot air balloon to a safe hillside landing nearby. Tom Baldwin was in San Francisco for the Balloon races earlier in the day and had drifted thirty four miles from the corner of Van Ness and Market Street launch site to the successful conclusion in Niles Canyon. 

Thomas Baldwin left his job as a brakeman on the Illinois Railroad to join a circus as an daredevil acrobat in 1875 where he combined a trapeze and hot air balloon with his innovative high wire act and made some of the earliest parachute jumps on record. Fascinated by the airship technology of the time, Baldwin designed and supervised the construction of the California Eagle, a gasoline engine paddle propeller powered airship, gaining enough knowledge to take on his own independent airship projects. In 1904 he designed and constructed California Arrow, a hydrogen filled cigar shaped craft powered by a Glenn Curtiss motorcycle engine that made it’s maiden flight over an enthusiastic crowd of thousands of onlookers at Idora Park in Oakland. 

In the early days of flight and Impressed by his lighter-than-air crafts, the Army Signal Corps paid Baldwin ten thousand dollars for a ninety five foot long dirigible “capable of sustained and controlled navigation”. In 1910, just seven years after the Wright Brothers first powered flight, he designed his own biplane, dubbed the Red Devil, and returned to performing daring aerial feats with a small troupe of aeronauts. Baldwin returned to dirigible design and development in 1914, built the Navy’s first successful dirigible, trained pilots, and volunteered his services to the US Army Balloon Corps during World War l. Baldwin joined the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company following the war as a designer and manufacturer of the companies iconic airships. 

Photo: Baldwin’s California Arrow airship and Red Devil biplane.   Bill 11/24