John J. Montgomery, the 1883 glide, the 1905 death at Santa Clara, the lawsuits against the Wright company and the Silver Wing. All records sourced and cited.
In February 1921, the Wright Flyer was set up in a field outside Dayton, Ohio, so it could be photographed for a lawsuit.
The Smithsonian still has the picture. It is labelled "Defendant's Exhibit No. 38-6." The plaintiffs were the widow and family of a San Diego man named John J. Montgomery, and the defendant was the Wright company. Orville Wright gave depositions in the case in 1920 and 1921. The Library of Congress holds them.
The family's argument went back to a hill on Otay Mesa, near the Mexican border, and a glider made of ash ribs and muslin that Montgomery's sister sewed. They said he flew it there in 1883, twenty years before Kitty Hawk.
Hollywood later made a movie about him with Glenn Ford in the lead. A man died flying one of his gliders in front of two thousand people. And the flight itself, the one the whole story rests on, was never photographed, never written up in a newspaper at the time, and has been told at least two different ways.
The Montgomerys were not ordinary ranchers. John's father, Zachariah Montgomery, was a lawyer and publisher who would later serve as an Assistant Attorney General of the United States under Grover Cleveland. In the early 1880s the family had a ranch at Fruitland, in the Otay Valley, south of San Diego.
John was in his twenties and obsessed with birds. According to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, which made his glider an engineering landmark in 1996, he set up a workshop in a barn on the ranch in 1882, and his sisters would stir up their grandmother's chickens so he could watch them fly.
He built a glider: about twenty feet across, ribs of ash, a curved wing of unbleached muslin that his sister Jane sewed, about forty pounds in all. A movable tail for pitch. To turn, he shifted his body.
Here is where the story splits.
The version on the monument at Otay Mesa says Montgomery made "man's first controlled winged flights from this hilltop in August 1883." The ASME brochure gives the date as August 28, 1883. It says his brother James ran ahead pulling a rope while John ran along straddling the keel, that the glider lifted off the edge of Wheeler Hill into the wind, and that the brothers paced off the flight afterward at six hundred feet. The San Diego Air and Space Museum says the same: six hundred feet, about fifteen feet up. It adds a sentence that matters: "Although photographs or other evidence did not document this feat, eyewitnesses swore to it." The witnesses were family and a few neighboring ranchers.
The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum dates it to the summer of 1884 and gives a range of 325 to 650 feet.
Then there is the oldest account in print, and it is the most interesting one.
Nobody outside the family heard about the Otay Mesa glide for about a decade. In August 1893, Octave Chanute, the engineer who was gathering everything known about flight, invited Montgomery to speak at the International Conference on Aerial Navigation in Chicago.
Chanute wrote up what Montgomery told him in his 1894 book, Progress in Flying Machines, the book that the Wright brothers and every other experimenter of the period read. On pages 248 and 249, Chanute describes the glider's wings as "arched beneath, like those of a gull," a hill "nearly a mile long" facing a sea breeze of eight to twelve miles an hour, and a pilot who "gave a jump into the air without previous running." He could "direct his course by leaning to one side or the other."
And then: "The total distance glided was about 100 ft."
Chanute also recorded what happened on the next try. A gust caught the glider, and Montgomery was "tossed some 8 or 10 ft. into the air, overturned, and thrown down headlong." The machine was "smashed past mending."
So the earliest written record says one hundred feet with no running start and no rope. The six hundred feet, the rope and the paced-off distance appear in later tellings. Montgomery himself is quoted, from a talk he gave to the Aeronautical Society of New York years later, as saying he glided "a distance of six hundred feet."
Historians have argued about it ever since. Craig Harwood and Gary Fogel's 2012 study places it in 1884. A 2005 book by Herbert Lockwood is titled The Montgomery Myth: The Flight That Never Was. Even the Journal of San Diego History, in a 2006 footnote, says the facts are "in dispute and there are many doubters."
What nobody disputes is that something flew off that hill with a man on it, and that it was a long time before anybody in Ohio did the same with an engine.
Montgomery took a job teaching at Santa Clara College in Northern California and kept building gliders. By 1905 he had a tandem winged glider and a way to launch it from very high up: a hot air balloon carried it aloft and then let it go.
The pilot was a parachute jumper named Daniel Maloney. On April 29, 1905, at Santa Clara College, the balloon lifted him and the glider to about four thousand feet, and Maloney glided down in front of a crowd of about 1,500, according to the Smithsonian.
On July 18, 1905, he went up again. A line from the balloon fouled the glider. The San Francisco Call ran the story the next morning under the headline "AERONAUT DANIEL MALONEY IS DASHED TO DEATH AT SANTA CLARA." It reported that "Two thousand people saw the accident," and that a Jesuit who worked with Montgomery, Father Bell, "raised his biretta and administered absolution to the man in the clouds."
In 1906, Montgomery received U.S. patent 831,173 for his "Aeroplane."
Montgomery never stopped. In the fall of 1911 he was making test flights in a new glider he called the Evergreen, in the hills of Evergreen near San Jose.
On October 31, 1911, a gust caught it close to the ground. The Smithsonian says he stalled at under twenty feet, hit his head on an exposed bolt and died about two hours later. The San Francisco Call put it across the front page the next morning: "PLUNGE KILLS MONTGOMERY." The paper said he died "in the arms of his devoted wife."
The Evergreen survived. It hangs in the San Diego Air and Space Museum in Balboa Park.
His widow, Regina, went to court. A 1912 suit was dismissed. In 1917 the family sued the Wright-Martin company and the federal government. Both suits failed, but they went far enough that Orville Wright sat for depositions and the 1903 Flyer was photographed as an exhibit.
In 1946, Columbia Pictures released Gallant Journey, a film about Montgomery's life. William Wellman directed it. He had made Wings, which won the first Academy Award for best picture. Glenn Ford played Montgomery, and Janet Blair played Regina.
That year Santa Clara dedicated an obelisk to him, carved with a line attributed to Alexander Graham Bell: "All subsequent attempts in aviation must begin with the Montgomery machine."
San Diego claimed him back in May 1950. On May 20, the city named its new airport on Kearny Mesa Montgomery Field. It had opened in 1937 as Gibbs Field, and since 2016 it has been Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport, on John J. Montgomery Drive.
On May 21, the San Diego Junior Chamber of Commerce dedicated a monument on the hill at Otay Mesa. It is a stainless steel test wing panel from a Consolidated B-32 bomber, about ninety feet long. Modernist architect Lloyd Ruocco designed it. Locals call it the Silver Wing. Montgomery's brother James and sister Jane were there. James was the brother who, in the family's telling, had pulled the rope.
The state made the site California Historical Landmark No. 711 in 1959. The city made it Historical Landmark No. 13 in 1970. It is not a National Historic Landmark, though you will see that claimed online.
The hill is now Montgomery-Waller Park, at Coronado Avenue and Beyer Boulevard, a city park with a recreation center and a view across the South Bay. The wing still stands on it.
Around it, the empty mesa is now one of the busiest stretches of the Mexican border. The Otay Mesa port of entry, opened in the 1980s, is the busiest commercial crossing in California according to the federal General Services Administration.
Octave Chanute's Progress in Flying Machines (1894), pages 248 and 249, read from the scanned original. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers landmark brochure (1996) and the San Diego Air and Space Museum. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The San Francisco Call of July 19, 1905 and November 1, 1911, and the Wright Papers, both at the Library of Congress. Landmark and airport records from the California Office of Historic Preservation and the City of San Diego.
Where the sources disagree, on the year and on the distance, we have printed both.
The glider itself, the one from the hill, might have settled the argument. Engineers could have measured it. It stayed in the Montgomery barn in the Otay Valley for more than thirty years, along with his other early prototypes, according to the ASME.
In January 1916, after weeks of record rain, the Lower Otay Dam gave way. The San Diego History Center counts at least twenty dead. The water ran down the Otay Valley and took the barn, the gliders and, according to one family account, papers that might have pinned down the date.
That was the winter San Diego had hired a rainmaker.
The plans survived. In 1962 they turned up in a trunk kept by his sister Jane, the one who sewed the muslin. They are dated 1882.
More San Diego history: every story, oldest history first.