CHARLES KEENEY HAMILTON.
Charles Keeney Hamilton is justly regarded as one of the most skilful of aviators. He was born in Connecticut in 1881, and showed his “bent” by making distressing, and often disastrous, leaps from high places with the family umbrella for a parachute.
In 1904 he worked with Mr. Israel Ludlow, who at that time was experimenting with gliders of his own construction, and when Mr. Ludlow began towing them behind automobiles, Hamilton rode on the gliders and steered them. Later he became interested in ballooning, and made a tour of Japan with a small dirigible.
Hamilton and Latham.
He early became famous in the aviation world by his spectacular glides from a great height. He has said that the first of these was unintentional, but his motor having stopped suddenly while he was high in the air, he had only the other alternative of falling vertically. The sensation of the swift gliding having pleased him, he does it frequently “for the fun of it.” These glides are made at so steep an angle that they have gained the distinctive name, “Hamilton dives.”
Hamilton came most prominently before the public at large with his flight from Governor’s Island to Philadelphia and back, on June 13, 1910. Following close upon Curtiss’s flight from Albany to New York, it was not only a record-breaking achievement, but helped to establish in this country the value of the aeroplane as a vehicle for place-to-place journeyings.