By Phil Roberts
It was a winter day in Kitty Hawk, North Caroline, in 1903 when Wilbur and Orville Wright’s flying machine launched the air age. The Wright plane flew for 59 seconds at a speed of 30 miles per hour. Hot-air balloons had launched people into the skies for decades, but the Wright’s pioneered powered flight.
Leonard da Vinci sketched plans for such a machine in the 15th century. Inventors in succeeding years tried unsuccessfully to follow birds into the air. Two of these “almost fliers” lived in Wyoming.
In the 1880s, some 20 years before the Wright brothers’ flight, William A. Heath, a Rhode Island-born railroad locomotive painter developed a pilotless flying machine. According to an article in the Wyoming State Journal, Heath’s device was “powered by a kerosene engine and with a dragon-fly inspired body.”
The Civil War veteran of the battles of Antietam and Fredericksburg came to Wyoming in 1873 from Iowa. After short stays in Cheyenne and Laramie, he and his family moved to Rawlins. The Union Pacific employed him to paint landscapes and other colorful decorations on their locomotives and tenders, consistent with the custom of the times. A skilled craftsman and mechanic, Heath built the family home and tinkered with all types of mechanical devices.
“Yesterday W. A. Heath, a well-known artisan of Rawlins was the city (Cheyenne) to attend the big Frontier celebration….. Mr. Heath has just completed the model of an airship which he claims can be governed and fly in any direction, even against a strong wind,” a Cheyenne newspaper reported.
The article mentioned that Heath was planning a trip to Chicago where he would have the “novel invention…constructed along the lines he has conceived.”
Nothing is known of the results of Heath’s later airplane experiments, but clearly he did not fly at Kitty Hawk or anytime before the Dayton bicycle shop operators.
In later years Heath invented a device, apparently with commercial applications. “He developed an ankle knee shackle which would trip a running prisoner to which it was attached,” his daughter wrote many years later. There is no evidence that his proposed airplane was to be equipped with shackles, but might it have been the origin of the idea for seat belts in modern airplanes?
Heath moved to Lander and later to Lamar, Colorado, where he died in 1911, the year before Wilbur Wright died of typhoid fever in Dayton, Ohio.
The second would-be inventor was also actively experimenting with airship designs in the 1880s. Jack Copman, then living in a dugout on Upper Shell Creek in what is now Big Horn County, made a model of an airplane. A ranch employee of H. C. Lovell and an independent trapper, Copman came to Wyoming about 1880. He herded cattle from Oregon to the Big Horn Basin area.
It is said that his airplane was made “without nails or other materials aside from the pieces themselves, which we so fitted together that the model was of sufficient strength to hold it together…” One person who saw the model in 1882 or 1883 said he believed “that if Copman had had a gasoline engine to furnish the power he would have been the first man in the air.”
Copman designed his airship to take off from a cliff near the Lovell ranch. If he managed to fly, he told friends it would be a great day for him. But if he failed, the 500-foot cliff could be his tomb.
There is no record of his ever flying the airplane he designed from the cliff or from anywhere else. He died of a stroke in 1907. His widow is said to have kept his cremated remains on a high shelf in her house. At her death in 1936, his ashes were buried beside her in the Greybull cemetery, miles below that majestic cliff which some 50 years before challenged his imagination. The cliff still bears the name “Copman’s Tomb.”