Lawrence Marshall Chevrolet

In Another Time > Planes, beaches and automobiles in the Wildwoods

Although the two sets of brothers probably never met, the Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville, and the Baker brothers, J. Thompson, Latimer and Philip, had something in common. They were all inventors at about the same time.

The Wrights have been credited with having given birth to the powered airplane on Dec. 17, 1903 with Orville clinging to a wing as he piloted the plane. Like all births there was a gestation period to make it happen, however, and it started in 1896 at their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, and came to fruition at the wind swept beach of Kitty Hawk in North Carolina.

Also at the seashore, but hundreds of miles to the north, the Bakers had discovered much of the island of what was to become known as the Wildwoods in the late 19th century. They were to invent and build the territory as seashore resorts while the Wrights were flying high with their invention. As history turned out, Orville Wright was a better inventor than prognosticator.

“No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris (because) no known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping,” Orville predicted.

Latimer Baker, who was to become mayor of the borough of Wildwood in 1895 before it became a city in 1912 , was not all that prophetic either when he was first shown the land which the Wright brothers invention was to look down on .He called the territory “uninhabitable and inaccessible.”

Orville was to make other statements, not necessarily cerebral, when he and his brother, both initially bicycle manufacturers, invented the flying machine.

“The airplane stays up because it doesn’t have the time to fall,” he said one time.

Another time, hardly recognizing its main future purpose of transportation, Orville pushed it as something to be used in a sporting event.

“The exhilaration of flying is too keen, the pleasure too great, for it to be neglected as a sport,” he contended.

Indeed, at the beginning that was what the flying machine was all about. Entrepreneurs at amusement parks and seashore resorts were quick to use the airplane as a drawing card exhibit for visitors. The Wildwoods were a little slow on the uptake, presumably because the Baker brothers and their contemporaries were too busy selling and buying lots and developing the island to look in the air.

The airplane inspired some popular songs in the years that followed. One of them, sometimes still heard in Lawrence Welk- like revivals, was “Come Josephine in My Flying Machine. Up She Goes.” The music was written by Fred Fisher and the lyrics by Alfred Bryan and it tells the story of a young man courting his girl by way of a “flying machine.

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