In February 1909, at Baddeck, Nova Scotia, J.A.D. McCurdy, a 22-year-old visionary, made the first successful airplane flight in Canada. He would have other early aviation successes: the first flight of a Canadian-built aircraft at Camp Petawawa, Ontario, in August 1909; the first transmission of a radio message in flight in 1910; and, in 1911, the longest overwater flight up to that time from Key West in Florida to Cuba. These were but some of the achievements of an outstanding Canadian air pioneer.
 

J.A.D. McCurdy at the controls of the Silver Dart. [Photo, courtesy City of Toronto Archives/SC 244-29]

Jack McCurdy was born at Baddeck in 1886, the son of Arthur McCurdy, inventor of the film-processing tank and local newspaper publisher. In 1906 he graduated from the University of Toronto in mechanical engineering and the next year joined the Aerial Experiment Association, newly founded at Baddeck by Alexander Graham Bell. Bell, by now a wealthy man with a list of inventions to his credit, had been experimenting with heavier-than-air flight well before the Wright Brothers decisively achieved it by their own flights at Kittyhawk, North Carolina, in 1903. Bell nonetheless went on with his own aerial investigations at Baddeck where he had his summer home by the quiet waters of the long and beautiful Bras d’Or lakes which provided an excellent site for hydroplane or seaplane experimentation. Bell recruited, by 1907, four qualified young men to build, test, and pilot his prototype air machines. They were two Canadian engineers: University of Toronto graduates, McCurdy and Frederick “Casey” Baldwin, and two Americans — Glenn Curtiss, owner of a motorcycle factory at Hammondsport, New York, and Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge of the U.S. Army. Sad to say, Selfridge was killed in an early air crash in the United States in September 1908, in an airplane piloted by Orville Wright, who survived the crash.

As for the A.E.A., it first spent time experimenting with elaborate kite designs, and then moved the work to Hammondsport, where Glenn Curtiss had his engine plant and where four biplanes soon were being built for trials. The first was flown there in March 1908 by Casey Baldwin, who thus became not only the first Canadian to fly but also and the first ever to fly publicly. But the first person to make a successful flight in Canada was McCurdy. His biplane, the Silver Dart, was shipped to Baddeck for winter testing. On February 23, 1909, he took off in a test flight above the ice of Lake Bras d’Or (his ground crew were on skates) and rose smoothly to some 30 feet in a flight of about half a mile at forty miles an hour — little enough by any later standards but more than startling to the watchers on hand — about 100 of Bell’s neighbours. “Everyone seemed dumbfounded,” reported the press. Before being damaged beyond repair by landing in soft sand at Petawawa, Ontario, McCurdy’s Silver Dart would fly more than 200 flights.
 

Giving birth to flight in Canada, J.A.D. McCurdy and his Silver Dart climb into the frigid sky above the ice of the Bras d’Or lakes at Baddeck, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, on February 23, 1909. Robert Bradford’s painting, rendered in 1965, commemorates this historic event. [Painting reproduced, courtesy Robert Bradford]

In August 1909, both McCurdy and Baldwin gave demonstration flights in the Silver Dart or the Baddeck I, the first all-Canadian-built aircraft. But the army officers present at the Petawawa army camp saw little military value in the new contraptions. Baldwin turned from flying in 1911 to take up the study and building of hydrofoils. McCurdy, however, carried on until 1916, marking up air records for speed and distance, but finally he, too, ceased to fly and at Toronto went into the building and supply end of a growing aviation industry. In 1928 he formed the Reid Aircraft Company; the next year he became president of a merged corporation, Curtiss-Reid Aircraft Ltd. With the onset of the Second World War, he became Assistant Director General of Aircraft Production in Ottawa, a public post he held until 1947.

That year, the Canadian government named him Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia. Now in his sixties, he filled that role admirably until his term ended in 1952. Perhaps the happiest recognition for Jack McCurdy came in 1959 on the fiftieth anniversary of his airborne flight at Baddeck in the Silver Dart when he watched a reenactment to commemorate that epoch-changing event. He died two years later in 1961 — a Canadian who saw his own vision fulfilled through his own abilities.

J.M.S. Careless