WAS THIS MAN THE REAL FIRST FLY GUY?
Author finds evidence that carpenter beat Wright brothers to flight
IF YOU look in any encyclopedia you’ll be told that the first powered flight of an aircraft was made by American brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright in their Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903.
It was a feat of engineering that marked the beginning of the age of the aeroplane.
But there is a legend that has been passed down the generations in a quiet corner of Pembrokeshire that, if true, would give Wales, not America, the right to boast about being the location of the first powered flight in recorded history.
People in the picturesque coastal town of Saundersfoot, near Tenby, have long shared the colourful and intriguing story of a local carpenter, Bill Frost, who is said to have designed, built, and briefly flown an aircraft in 1896, a full seven years before the Wright Brothers.
For decades, it wasn’t much more than a yarn shared over pints at the local pub. That was until inquisitive local author Roscoe Howells began to dig deeper into the story and discovered there may be more to it than mere legend.
In his book A Pembrokeshire Pioneer: Bill Frost of Saundersfoot, The First Man to Fly, Mr Howells pieces together the snippets of gossip and the few pieces of documentation that exist about Bill Frost’s legendary flight, bringing the legend an inch closer to reality.
The story goes that Frost, a relatively poor carpenter, born in Saundersfoot in 1848, had a childhood obsession with flying which later translated into him building a flying machine at his home workshop on St Bride’s Hill.
There are even accounts of him running through Saundersfoot’s fields with a sheet of zinc above his head, perhaps trying to work out the laws of aerodynamics.
The 30ft-long craft he built was made from bamboo and canvas and had hydrogen-filled bags in it to keep it aloft. There was even a helicopter-like propeller built into the top and a rudder to steer it. A lever was used to spread the wings in flight and to make the aircraft rise and drop in the air – at least, that was the theory.
Legend has it that on or around September 24, 1896, Frost finally realised his dream of flying in a field near Griffithston Hill. Accounts say that he managed to control the craft for at least 500 yards before the undercarriage caught on a tree, bringing the flight to an abrupt halt.
Determined to try again, Frost tethered his flying machine to the tree, which local people told Mr Howells still stands in the field, but there was a great storm that night and the contraption was completely destroyed.
As a poor man, he wasn’t able to rebuild the craft to make another attempt before his death in 1935.
The problem is, there are no surviving written testimonials that anyone other than Bill witnessed the flight, or any photographs of the attempt, unlike with the Wright Brothers’ historic flight almost a decade later.
However, incredibly, a patent was found for a “flying machine” submitted to the patent office by Frost himself in October 1895. The patent included a detailed diagram and outlined what each lettered part of the craft was designed to do and how it would work.
“The flying machine is propelled into the air by two reversible fans revolving horizontally” is the first line on the patent submission.
Even more tantalisingly, Mr Howells found an article in the Tenby and County News from September 30, 1896 with “Great storm” emblazoned as a headline, giving more weight to the claim that the craft had been destroyed by bad weather.
Whether Frost really did take to the skies before any other human is something that will probably never be proved.
Aeronautical engineers at Boscombe Down airbase looked at the patent and said the machine would never have flown. They were going to build a replica, but when war broke out in Iraq their plan stalled and was never realised.
Whatever the truth, Frost can be appreciated as a pioneer with an ambition that went beyond his quiet life in Saundersfoot and up into the skies.