Preston Watson
Preston Watson (1880-1915) was a Scottish aviation pioneer, who it is sometimes claimed was the first true aviator. He is supposed to have made and controlled motorised flight with a heavier-than-air aircraft in 1903 - thus predating the Wright brothers flight.
The Watson brothers were sons of the prominent Dundee family that made up one half of the Watson and Philip Wholesalers. Preston joined his father in this business but had a keen interest in mechanics that led him to fly.
Preston built and adapted 3 planes from 1903 to 1913 all at a cost of £1,000 each paid by his father. He also invented a rocking wing system for control which he patented in 1909.
Preston Watson seems to have built three aeroplanes, one in 1909, one in 1910 and the last one in 1913. Only the last two got airborne under their own power. Two grainy photographs are the earliest showing one of his aircraft in flight. These pictures are found in the 15 May 1914 issue of Flight magazine. These show his second machine in flight at Errol in Perthshire in 1912.
Preston was never able to tell his story as he died while training with the Royal Naval Air Service in 1915. The plane exploded above Eastbourne.
Notes from JA received 13/02/2011
Preston Albert Watson was born in 1880, the son of Thomas Watson of Balgowan, who was a food merchant in Dundee. His family name formed part of the company name of food producers Watson and Philip, the successor to which, W and P Food Service, is still operating from Riverside Avenue in Dundee.
Preston Watson’s maternal grandfather was Dundee’s Provost James Yeaman, who had been Liberal MP for Dundee from 1873 to 1880.
Preston attended Dundee High School and was best known in his youth as an excellent all-round athlete. He grew to be a tall lad of over six feet and well built, at around 12 stones (87 kilos).
In 1898, at the age of 18, he believed he had successfully analysed the principles governing the mechanism of bird flight and he decided next to go to University College Dundee. His well-to-do father had no problem with this plan, and at University Preston studied physics and dynamics under Professor Kuenen. From the Professor he learned what was then termed ‘natural philosophy’ and gained at least a rudimentary understanding of aerodynamics, a science about which at that time very little was known.
By around 1901 he became obsessed with the idea of building a machine that could fly and he managed to persuade his businessman father to advance him £1,000 to help him do just that. A friend of Preston’s, Bob Melville who farmed at East Leys Farm near Errol in the Carse of Gowrie, allowed him to use a shed in a flat field not far from the north bank of the Tay and here he started work on his first aeroplane.
Exactly what form this first Watson aeroplane took has always been a matter of conjecture as no drawings of it seem to have survived. Some local people have claimed it was a flapping-wing machine (known technically as an ornithropter) but no man-made ornithropter has ever been known to fly successfully and (despite his interest in bird flight) it seems unlikely that Preston after his University studies would have gone down that technological dead-end. (Later on, Preston Watson did take out British Patent 23,553 in 1907 for an odd-looking paddle-wheel type of flying machine, but this probably had little if any bearing on the actual machine of his early flying experiments.)
Most aviation historians say that this first flying machine was simply a glider, and many gliders had already been built and flown in many parts of the world earlier than this, by people such as Lillienthal in Germany, Percy Pilcher (a lecturer at Glasgow University) in Scotland and by the Wright brothers themselves. The McManus Galleries in Dundee have what is claimed to be a model of this machine, and this is in glider form, with skids instead of wheels, and a box-kite type of tail.
There are also claims, backed only by circumstantial and anecdotal evidence (including that of Preston Watson’s older brother James Y. Watson) that Preston’s first machine was actually a powered aeroplane, and that it made several flights over the level terrain near Errol in or around July 1903, fully six months before the Wright brothers made what is now generally accepted to have been the first manned flight of a heavier-than-air powered aeroplane.
There is no doubt whatsoever about the fact that Preston Watson went on in later years to build two other powered aeroplanes which he and his brother flew over the Carse of Gowrie. These were technically very different, especially from the flying control point of view, from the machines being flown by the Wright brothers at around the same time. Even if it can never be proved that Preston Watson and his brother James actually achieved sustained flight in a powered heavier-than-air aeroplane a few months ahead of the Wrights in 1903, it has to be accepted that Preston Watson, working independently and not in any way simply copying the designs of other aeronauts, did design, build and fly an aeroplane of a truly unique type, in Scotland, during the pioneering days of powered flight.
What made this second aeroplane of Preston’s unique was his method of controlling the aeroplane. Instead of warping or twisting the wings of the machine the way the Wrights did to control its turning, he copied the technique which he had observed the gulls using and fitted an extra ‘rocking’ wing above the main one, and by leaning this to one side or the other the pilot could correct deviations from a straight line of flight and control the machine to make it turn the way he wanted. This system not only worked; it worked well, and Preston sent its specification to the Patent Office in December 1908, receiving another Patent in 1909 for his ‘rocking wing’ aeroplane.
Other advanced design features for the era were the curved aerofoil section wings, a result of Preston’s bird studies, and the longitudinal ‘Vee’ arrangement whereby the tail elevator was used to maintain the longitudinal balance of the aircraft in flight, exactly as tail planes still do in most aircraft flying today. In contrast, the Wright machines were of the ‘canard’ type, with their elevators forward of the main planes, a concept that has been followed since these days by precious few aircraft designers.
He also incorporated these features into his third flying machine, which was completed and flying in 1910. The Watson ‘rocking wing’ machines seem to have been fairly easy for pilots to learn to control, as several people managed to fly Preston Watson’s machines reasonably competently. At the same period in America it was said that the only people who could fly the inherently unstable Wright Flyers were Wilbur and Orville themselves, and even they could at first only manage very brief flights.
Preston Watson entered his third aeroplane in a flying competition in Paris in 1914, where he was awarded a prize for the safety and stability of its design. Later that year World War 1 broke out and, since his aeroplane was of experimental design and unsuitable for military purposes, it was broken up.
Preston volunteered for military service and joined the Royal Naval Air Service early in WW1. Tragically he was killed at the age of 34 when the naval aircraft he was piloting at about 1,000 feet over the vicinity of Eastbourne suffered a mechanical failure and crashed on 30 June 1915 near the village of Cross in Hand in Sussex. He was buried with full military honours in the Western Cemetery in Dundee.
About half a century ago, just as aviation enthusiasts the world over were getting ready to celebrate 50 years of powered flight, Preston Watson’s brother James had retired from full-time employment with the Messrs Watson and Philip food company. He decided to devote most of his free time to ‘proving’ that Preston had in fact been the first person in the world to successfully fly a powered aeroplane. James was then still an active member of the Strathtay Aero Club at Perth and in fact remained an active pilot, flying Tiger Moths, Austers and Chipmunks until he was well over seventy. As an elderly man in the 1950s he used to claim that a bracing flight in an open cockpit aeroplane was a wonderful way to cure a bout of ‘flu! But his search for proof about the date of his brother’s first flight turned out to be an uphill struggle.
He did manage to find and interview several elderly people who claimed to remember the aeronautical on goings at East Leys and Daleally farms near Errol at the start of the 20th century. One of these was Scot Symon senior who lived in Errol. (He was father of an international footballer, who was destined the following year (1954) to become manager of Rangers, a post he held with great success until 1967.) Scot Symon senior said he had seen Preston Watson’s aeroplanes flying quite frequently and a friend of his, John Christie, who had been a ploughman on Daleally farm from 1900 to 1906, said he had often stopped work to watch the plane clearing hedges and fences. He was sure the plane had been flying in 1903. But the uncorroborated recollections of a 74 year-old man cannot change history.
Later James Preston met 69 year-old William Brown of Errol who took him down to the very spot close to the banks of the Tay where he remembered Preston Watson’s plane had been kept. (It now forms part of the WW2 RAF Errol aerodrome.) William Brown had worked at Daleally farm for only two years, from November 28th 1901 until late in 1903 and clearly remembered seeing Preston’s machine flying while he was busy carting reeds from the riverside reed beds to Errol railway station, for packing potatoes into wagons. “It never got right away up into the sky,” he said, “but high enough for another ploughman and myself to see right below it.” He remembered the clatter of the engine being very noisy, describing it as “… a rackety-tack-tack-tack sound, like a motor bike.”
A Broughty Ferry man, Alexander Robertson also told James Watson about how, shortly before he had left school in 1903 when aged thirteen and a half, he had guided a pony to help Preston Watson pull his plane from the shed to the flying field.
A David Urquhart of Kirriemuir remembered and described to James Watson exactly how the plane had been launched, using two falling 56 pound weights and a blacksmith’s anvil to catapult it into the air after running along greased wooden rails.
A Dundee carpenter, Mr Kerr B. Sturrock remembered how he had been commissioned by Preston Watson to build propellers for his aeroplanes. With no previous knowledge on which to base their design he produced twelve propellers from yellow pine, oak and other timbers before he managed to make one that could stand up to Preston’s requirements. It was made of laminated Australian walnut with a certain amount of cross-grain, and this withstood the thrashing given to it by the aeroplane engine. When this was taking place Mr Sturrock remembered clearly that he had got into trouble from his fiancée for spending too much time making aeroplane propellers instead of ‘walking out’ with her. They were married in September 1905 and this appears to indicate that Preston Watson was experimenting with an aeroplane powered by what is believed to have been a de Dion engine (removed from a motor car, modified and lightened for aircraft use) well before the date of Kerr Sturrock’s wedding.
Sadly, however, none of these witnesses could produce any tangible or documentary evidence to back up their claims as to the exact dates involved, however plausible much of their circumstantial evidence may seem to be.
Armed with what facts he had managed to assemble, James Y. Watson went off to London in 1953 to attend the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Wright Brothers’ achievement, and in the hope he could convince someone that his brother had in fact beaten the Americans to it. His aim was to meet Lord Brabazon of Tara who, as Colonel J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon, is generally acknowledged to have been the first Briton to fly an aeroplane in the British Isles (in late April or early May 1909), but because Lord Brabazon was too busily involved with the Wright brothers’ 50th anniversary dinner of the Royal Aeronautical Society, James didn’t manage to arrange a meeting and had to content himself with a letter of apology from the great man. In this letter Lord Brabazon admitted to having been upset by a claim from A. V. Roe that he had flown in 1908, before Brabazon’s first flight, and now was frankly appalled at another claim on behalf of Preston Watson coming fifty years later. (This letter, and other correspondence and photographs on this subject were kindly made available to the writer by the curator of the Heritage section of the McManus Galleries in Dundee, where models of two of the Preston Watson aircraft are also held. One photograph, dated 1908, clearly shows Preston Watson’s second machine, powered by a 3-cylinder Humber engine, in flight over fields at Errol indicating that, if the date is correct, Preston Watson certainly beat Lord Brabazon into the air and really was the first British citizen to pilot an aeroplane in Britain.)
James Watson did however make direct contact with one Britain’s foremost aviation historians, Charles H. Gibbs-Smith, and a long exchange of letters ensued between James Watson and Gibbs-Smith. Unfortunately for James Watson, Gibbs-Smith had just completed his book History of Aviation (published in America in 1954), a meticulously researched book in which he had gone to great pains to ‘prove’ conclusively that the Wright brothers were indeed the first to fly. Being approached out of the blue by an unknown man who claimed his equally unknown brother had usurped the Wrights’ place in history seems to have put Gibbs-Smith immediately on the defensive. He considerably upset James Watson by demolishing each and every claim James made on behalf of his brother Preston one by one as he put them forward. Old men’s memories are notoriously unreliable; no engine powerful enough to make an aeroplane fly existed in Europe in 1903; Preston Watson didn’t even possess an engine before 1906 at the earliest; Preston probably never actually flew any of his aeroplanes before 1910; and so on.
Shortly before James Y. Watson died in November 1957 he received a letter from Gibbs-Smith in which he wrote “I do hope you do not think that I wish to ‘debunk’ your brother, who was a most admirable and talented inventor…” but then continued with another catalogue of denials that there was any way in which Preston could ever have flown before the Wright brothers.
Over the next few years C. H. Gibbs-Smith continued to write many books on the history of early flying, including 'The World's First Aeroplane Flights' and 'The Wright Brothers: A Brief Account of Their Work' in 1963, and 'The Invention of the Aeroplane', 1809-1909 in 1966. In at least one of these books he contradicts the various claims made by James Y. Watson, including the date of construction of Preston Watson's first (probably glider) aircraft, but does not give any alternative date. But, that apart, his contacts with James Y. Watson don’t appear to have made any real impact on Gibbs-Smith at all, so far as granting to Preston Watson any credence of possibly having been one of the world’s earliest aviators.
I wondered why it was that so little evidence of the building and flying of the Preston Watson machines now seems to exist. There must have been drawings of the components, and other paperwork, such as invoices and receipts for materials, engines and propellers. What seems to have happened is that the early machines were destroyed early in WW1, as being of no military use. Then, following Preston’s own death in June 1915, his widow Beatrice had no wish to be reminded of his flying activities, and got rid of all the remaining artefacts. It appears that James Y. Watson took over all these documents and material at that time. Then in 1921 James Y. Watson married, and moved into a smaller house. His wife didn’t want the place cluttered up with all that old ‘rubbish’ about Preston’s aeroplanes. So, believing at that time that the drawings and paperwork were of no real value, James disposed of it all. Some thirty years later, at the time of the 50th anniversary of powered flight, he began deeply to regret having done so.
I wonder, though, what became of the three (or four) engines that Preston is supposed to have used to power these early aeroplanes. Surely nobody would simply scrap these items or throw them out? They included a 4-cylinder Dutheil-Chalmers, a 3-cylinder Humber, a 6-cylinder Anzani and just possibly that putative converted motor-car or cycle engine (said to have been a de Dion) reputedly used in Preston’s first machine. Many authorities have stated that Preston Watson possessed neither the skill nor the resources to build his own power-plant, but the Watson family was well-to-do, and had good connections in the local engineering businesses of, for example, Yeaman and Baggesen (Charlie Yeaman was Preston’s cousin) and Gourlay’s foundry in Dundee docks. At least one of the Watson aeroplanes was constructed in a shed at Yeaman and Baggesen and it is not outwith the bounds of possibility that an automotive engine might have been lightened and modified by them for use as Preston’s aero-engine. Sadly, again no records of any such work seem to remain. But, could one or more of these historic heirlooms still perhaps be lying somewhere in a farm shed, a workshop scrap-heap or someone’s cellar in Dundee or Errol? They could be unrecognised for what they are, buried under a pile of other mechanical engineering junk, old half-shafts, farm tractor gearboxes and rusty car bumpers. It would be wonderful if even one of them could be unearthed, possibly to join the scale models of Preston’s aeroplanes that are currently kept in Dundee’s McManus Galleries.
Another question that is often asked about Preston Watson is why, if he really did succeed in flying his aeroplane before the Wrights, did he do nothing to publicise this remarkable achievement? I believe the answer to that is quite simple. A hundred years ago, most people in France, Germany and Britain were highly sceptical about mechanical flight and tended to regard inventors who were attempting to fly simply as cranks or gullible fools who were wasting their time. In fact in Scotland, well into the early 20th century, anyone found tackling a seemingly impossible task was often told “Ye micht as weel try an’ flee in the air!” So Preston Watson probably didn’t want to expose himself to ridicule at the time, and kept his experiments as secret as possible.
Another possible reason for secrecy was the fact that he didn’t want other would-be aviators finding out too much, too early, about his successes, or his failures. Even although the American public tended to be less sceptical about powered flight than Europeans, the few and scanty newspaper reports that were published about the Wright brothers’ December 1903 flight were largely disbelieved and quickly forgotten. Even by 1907 very few of the American public were aware of their work. So it is not really all that surprising that Preston Watson’s flights (if indeed he did make them) went unreported, even in the local press. But the craftier Wrights not only had witnesses, they even had a cameraman on site to record their achievement.
There is, however, little doubt that Preston Watson considered himself to be an aviator. Following up a reference in some papers I borrowed from Mr J. D. Watson of Balbeggie (James Y. Watson’s son) I visited the beautiful little church of Kinclaven, near Blairgowrie in Perthshire where members of both the Watson and Philips families used to worship. There I concluded that the sermons around the turn of the 19th / 20th century must have been rather long and boring, for the young folk had had sufficient time to mark initials, drawings and dates into the pews. In pew 17 I could clearly distinguish the initials of one of the Philip family and two Watsons (‘A. P.’ – ‘M. W.’ – and ‘E. W.’) with the date ‘6/8/99’ alongside. And in pew 21, amongst other markings, I read ‘N. C. Philip 18/6/00’ and; ‘B. M. Philip 17/7/00’. The latter was 18 year-old Beatrice Philip, who was soon to become Preston Watson’s wife. And alongside these names and initials was the most fascinating of all. Preston Watson had marked his own initials, following them with one highly significant word that is still today, a full century later, perfectly clear to see. ‘P. W. - AVIATOR’.
Whatever the aviation experts now say, there seems no doubt that, in his own mind (and affirmed in the house of God) Preston Watson was an ‘aviator’. Having closely studied what little evidence there is now available, I personally do not think that Preston Watson did fly before the Wright brothers, although he almost certainly did fly before Brabazon. There is also not a shred of doubt in my mind that, regardless of whether or not he flew before the Wrights, Preston Watson was a very talented and skilful inventor. Working independently of other aviation pioneers with dogged determination (and a significant measure of sheer genius) he came up with a system for controlling an aeroplane which was completely original and which appears to have been perfectly dependable. He, and to some measure his brother James, devoted much of their young lives and energy to the development and testing of three pioneering designs of aeroplane and for that Preston especially deserves a great deal more credit than he has ever been given. It is sad that his place in the history of powered flight may actually have been somewhat clouded by the efforts made in the 1950s by his brother to place Preston’s early flights chronologically ahead of the Wright brothers, despite the lack of any concrete evidence.
See Also
Sources of Information
- [1] Wikipedia