Hello All,
A bit of online sleuthing has worked wonders ... I've been able to ID the ornithopter!
It was built by
Rex Pagett of Inglewood, Los Angeles in 1970. From what I can tell, the craft first appeared in the press when it was included in a story about "homemade flying machines", written by Don Dwiggins, and published in
West magazine, an
LA Times Sunday supplement, in their issue for November 29, 1970. Here's the part which concerns our ornithopter:
... other dauntless inventors, including Rex Pagett of Inglewood, think a man could fly by flapping home-made wings with his back muscles.
Pagett agrees with [P.H.] Spencer that the secret of flapping flight lies in the wingtips, which create strong vortex currents at the top and bottom of each stroke, a concept first stated in 1906 by Professor Harry La Verne Twining, secretary of the Aero Club of California: "The upstroke of the wing drives the bird forward in the plane of the wing just as surely as the downstroke does."
Pagett is a batman rather than a birdman. He paid a San Pedro sailmaker to make a pair of Dacron wing covers somehow reminiscent of Count Dracula's cape. With a few refinements, Pagett, who helped built Northrop Scorpion night fighters in World War II, is confident his batwing machine can fly a measured mile over a figure-eight course, to win England's coveted Henry Kremer Award for a successful man-powered flight.
In the months that followed, Dwiggins' article was re-formatted, re-edited, and re-published - without attribution - in several newspaper supplements, one being the
Hartford Courant, and in digests like the
Senior Weekly Reader. The item in the first post, which appeared in the 1973
Boys' Own Annual, is from yet another re-hashed and un-attributed version of Dwiggins' original piece.
The photographs which appeared in the
West magazine were probably originally in colour. Unfortunately the scans of them appear very dark; I think that's the result of the photographing/scanning processes which had been employed at the time.
Cheers,
Paul
