[Archive]: Twenty-one Photographs Related to U.S. Army Air Service Lieutenant Elmo Pickerill

1919. Unbound. Near Fine. A small archive of twenty-one gelatin silver photographs of and relating to U.S. Army Air Service lieutenant Elmo Pickerill. The majority measure approximately 5½" x 3¼" with captions. Two photos with just a bit of edgewear, a few with modest soiling on the versos, near fine overall.

The photos, circa 1918-1919, show Elmo Pickerill posed next to and onboard his airplanes, as well as a few photos taken in flight by Pickerell. Nineteen of the photos are inscribed on the verso, presumably in Pickerill's hand; many describing the aircraft in the photo, others describing the scene photographed from the aircraft, a few with messages such as "With best wishes to my friend Laura." Identified airplanes include a Handley Page bomber and a Curtiss Type JN-4H. One photo shows Elmo sitting on the wing of a crashed airplane, the inscription reading "U.S. Army aeroplane wrecked near College Station, Texas. April 19, 1918."

Elmo Pickerill is commonly credited with making the first aircraft-to-ground radio-telegraphic communication while flying solo in a Curtiss pusher on August 4, 1910. This would easily qualify him to be a member of the Early Birds (someone who flew prior to 1917, when the U.S. Army trained a large number of pilots for World War I), an organization of which he later held the position of secretary. However, according to Roger Connor and Alex Calta of the Smithsonian Air and Space Magazine, "there is no evidence that [Pickerill] was directly involved in aviation until 1918, when he joined the Army Air Service." They write "He enjoyed a successful career as an aviator, eventually commanding the 135th Observation Squadron... Despite these successes, Pickerill apparently felt he had missed an opportunity at historical greatness. By 1931, he had begun assembling a paper trail to support the claims that two decades before, Orville Wright taught him to fly, and that on August 4, 1910, he made a ‘round trip flight' from Mineola, New York, on which he ‘established two-way communication with...several steamships and the Marconi coastal wireless stations.'" This claim places the event 23 days ahead of John McCurdy's August 27 flight when, from his airplane, he transmitted a Morse message to radio operator Harry Horton, stationed on the roof of the Sheepshead Bay racetrack grandstand. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle proclaimed the feat as "the first time in the history of aerial navigation a wireless message was sent from a swiftly moving aeroplane." The University of Maryland, the Library of Congress, and the National Air and Space Museum archives contain many papers relating to Elmo Pickerill, with no real evidence to back up many of his claims. They do, however, include a July 26, 1918 memo to his Air Service superiors in which Pickerill reports he soloed earlier that month for the first time. As a result of his alleged lies, the Smithsonian has since removed Pickerill's checkered Early Bird cap from display, replacing it with that of another Early Bird, glider pioneer Ralph S. Barnaby.

An excellent group of images related to Elmo Pickerill, an interesting figure in early aviation and radio communication. Nearly all of the photos have been inscribed by him, featuring several different types of airplanes of which he flew.