“Hang your coat right there,” he remarked shortly. “We ain’t sneak thieves. Now, you’d better get down to a real job and make sure you’ve got the hang of everything. Turn in and help put your car together.”
When Roy and his father left the works that evening, an American Aeroplane Company Model No. 1 had been assembled, adjusted, tested and taken apart again. The next morning it would be crated and dispatched on its long journey to the west labeled: “R. C. Cook, Manager Utah Mining and Development Company, Bluff, Utah, via Dolores, Colorado.”
If there was anything in the construction of that aeroplane that could have been improved, it was not known to the airship skill of that day or to George W. Osborne. A fore and aft or lateral biplane, utilizing the highly successful flexible sustaining surfaces of the Montgomery glider, the whole width of the air craft was 32 feet. The front and rear planes were supported on the unique and distinguishing feature of the draft—a three-section frame extending fore and aft.
In the forward section, each section measuring 4 feet 7 inches in width and 7 feet in height—the single engine was located. On a cross shaft, fixed to the forward frame of the section, the two propellers revolved, operated by chain gears, one of which had the Wright reverse twist. In this section, but to the rear were the cooling coils and the gasoline tank. From the front of this section extended a vertical steering rudder patterned after the Wright machine.
To the rear section was attached a horizontal steering plane copied directly after the Montgomery rudder, a semi-circular plane 9 feet 10 inches high at its greatest diameter. In the middle section were seats for two passengers and the operator’s station. From the saddle of the latter, flexing wires connected both the planes with stirrups through the operation of which the equilibrium of the car was maintained. Levers and wires controlling the rear and forward rudders also ended here. From the section division timbers, uprights carried wires, bracing the big lateral planes in all directions. Short landing skids were modeled after the Wright air craft.
The motive power was a 25-horsepower watercooled Curtiss with four cylinders and weighed 180 pounds. The propellers measured 8 1/3 feet.
“What do you think about her?” asked Roy, as he and his father boarded the car homeward bound.
“It’s the best I can do,” was the answer. To Roy that was enough.