In Iowa City, the good folks who put together the annual Johnson County Fair were fortunate enough to sign a contract with Baldwin to bring his Red Devil to town for the annual Farmer’s Fall Festival. Communities all over the Midwest were clamoring for young pilots like Captain Tom, and others like him, to come to their city to show off their new flying machines. October 11-13, 1910 – Captain Tom and the Red Devil Come to Iowa City. On the return flight, Captain Tom, as he called himself, astounded the crowds by flying under both the Eads and McKinley bridges at fifty miles per hour, landing the Red Devil at 6:05 PM back in St. As the crowds cheered, Baldwin safely landed on the Illinois side of the river, across from Arsenal Street. Louis while 200,000 citizens lined the riverfront, anxiously looking northward. At 5:11 PM, Baldwin and his Red Devil took off from a field just north of St. Baldwin made history with the first aeroplane flight over the Mississippi River. By 1911 he had built several airplanes and had gained extensive experience as an exhibition pilot. After making a reputation with lighter-than-air craft, Thomas Scott Baldwin turned to heavier-than-air flying machines in 1909. He named his invention the Red Devil and now (1910), it was time to take his show on the road. Baldwin designed his own pusher biplane, one of the first to have a framework with interplane struts of mild steel tubing and wooded frame wings. Baldwin, was determined to outdo them all. One courageous man from Missouri, a balloonist named Thomas S. Across the county, young daredevils were building and (occasionally) flying these new airships, gathering a curious audience wherever and whenever they could.
Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.īy 1909, the Wright Brothers were stealing the show with their ‘heavier-than-air’ aeroplane, but, without a doubt, the competition was on. Orville and Wilber Wright successfully pulled off man’s first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft with the Wright Flyer four miles south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. On December 17, 1903, the world changed forever.
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