Flight: The Wrights and Others too.

      I visited the Wright Brothers Park alongside Maxwell Boulevard, overlooking the Alabama River last week.

 

     There's a monument there to the Wright Brothers, who briefly operated a flight school on what would become Maxwell AFB. 

 

   It was not a good day for flying when I took the photos, way too foggy, especially for early aviation pilots.

     Perhaps the most famous person to fly in one of those early planes, other than the Wright Brothers themselves, was Theodore Roosevelt, before he was president, in 1910. Watch early film of it HERE.

     And there were others experimenting with heavier than air vehicles back then. 

There's an excellent article in The Encyclopedia of Alabama that includes this:

"Andrew Denny (1812-1870), a native of Boston, Massachusetts, relocated to the Clarke County settlement of Suggsville in 1836 and is considered to be first aviation experimenter in Alabama. Regarded as an exceptional physician who treated the most challenging cases, Denny has also been described as an experimenter and visionary. A man of many interests, Denny maintained approximately 2,000 bee hives throughout the Suggsville community. Friends and neighbors would observe Denny sitting for hours studying the action of the bees, an activity that may have inspired him to conceive of a flying machine based on the motion of bees' wings."