More on Edwin Pynchon

[rich]

Edwin Pynchon seems a pynchon-like zany, eh?

book review from 1993

Book looks at the many would-be aviators before the Wrights

The continuation of this story did not appear on an inside page in Friday's
editions. This is the complete story.

When Wilbur and Orville Wright achieved powered flight in December 1903,
there was scarce notice of it, in part because the Dayton brothers wanted it
that way.

Today, as the centennial approaches, old claimants to the Wrights'
immortality are splashing up like corpses in a pond .

There is an East Texas claimant, the Rev. Burrell Cannon, whose neighbors
said his Ezekial Flying Machine flew in 1902. There's a New Zealander,
Richard Pearse, who said his bamboo monoplane made it aloft March 31, 1903.
Then there are the better-known rivals, Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian
and Gustave Whitehead of Connecticut.

And that's just the tip of the wing.

Curt Dalton, a Dayton historian and curator at the Montgomery County
Historical Society, has compiled a book detailing the stories of 41 men who
obtained U.S. patents for aerial devices or machines and listing a couple
hundred would-be aviators, all told. .....
Patent 508,753 went to *Edwin Pynchon* of Chicago for his 1893 plan to
launch a boat-like chamber propelled by cartridges of gun powder aft to get
it up to speed.

Shooting grenades out the plane's rear end `would seem a bad idea for
something that used flammable gas to fly,' Dalton notes. .....
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