Or only the first to crash? Jacob Friedrich Brodbeck may have made the first flight in a heavier-than-air craft, on Sept. 20, 1865–almost forty years before the Wright brothers–in a field in the Hill Country about three miles east of Luckenbach.
Tethered gas balloons had been used for military recon in the Civil War, but Brodbeck’s spring-wound engine was something new, supposedly (accounts vary) propelling him for 100 feet, just twelve feet above the ground, until the spring unwound and, oops, the crash ensued. Or not, depending who you believe.
The photo (owned by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library at the Alamo) suggests Brodbeck’s bird might have been a biplane, of a sort.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 