The June Bug's Fourth of July flight

On July 4, 1908, Glenn Curtiss flew the June Bug 5,090 feet across Pleasant Valley near Hammondsport. The Smithsonian's catalog for the Scientific American Trophy and the trophy's own inscription record the date, distance, aircraft, pilot, and place.

The flight had been planned as an official test. On July 1, Thomas Selfridge wrote to the U.S. Army's chief signal officer that the Aerial Experiment Association's third aerodrome was complete, had made nine successful flights, and was scheduled for the Scientific American Trophy test at Hammondsport on July 4.

The association had been experimenting through the winter. A March 19 letter on its letterhead placed Curtiss in Hammondsport during work on the Red Wing and its trials on the lake ice.

By the Fourth of July, the setting had changed to Pleasant Valley and the aircraft to the June Bug. An official committee observed the announced flight, which covered more than a kilometer.

The milestone is often described with the word “first.” The National Air and Space Museum gives it a specific meaning: the first officially recognized, pre-announced, and publicly observed flight in America. It was not the first American flight of any kind.

Curtiss was the pilot, and the association's records identify the team around him. Its July report names Alexander Graham Bell as chairman, Curtiss as director of experiments, F. W. Baldwin as chief engineer, J. A. D. McCurdy as treasurer, and Selfridge as secretary.

Those names and the advance report put the flight in context. Hammondsport's milestone was a documented public test by an experimental organization, tied to a particular aircraft, pilot, team, and stretch of Pleasant Valley.

Source note

The preflight chronology comes from Glenn Curtiss's March 19, 1908 letter in the Library of Congress Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers and Thomas Selfridge's July 1, 1908 Aerial Experiment Association report, PDF image 1. The date, 5,090-foot distance, place, trophy context, and qualified “first” come from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Scientific American Trophy catalog, inventory A19730589000.