An article previewing Clare in a Washington, DC-area newspaper.
Beneath a clear sky in mid-June, 1915, a newly built “hydro-aeroplane” named Clare slipped out of its shed on the foot of Duke street and into the Potomac River.
A.W. Richardson, the designer, had spent a year and $30,000 (the equivalent of about $850,000 today) to see this day. As aviation schemes of the era go, the yellow-painted craft of birch wood and canvas resting on twin, 28-feet-long pontoons on the river was among the most audacious.
The exact dimensions of the Clare’s length and wingspan are lost to history, but a front-page story in the Alexandria Gazette boasted it was the largest aircraft built in the world to date, beating even aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss’ prototype for a long-distance seaplane that had emerged a year earlier.
The only surviving picture of the Clare — a front-page photo in the Washington Times on the same day —confirms it was at least one of – if not THE – largest aircraft built barely over a decade after Orville Wright’s first powered flight in a heavier-than-air vehicle on Dec. 17, 1903. The picture reveals an unusual design, even for its time. Tandem biplanes are positioned forward and aft above a 6-foot-wide deck tucked between the pontoon floats. Two Emerson engines, supplied by an Alexandrian named Victor Emerson, are placed between each set of biplanes. Each engine drove a set of two-bladed propellers on either end of the pontoons in a push-pull configuration. The Clare emerged on the waterfront during a furious burst of innovation in the global aviation industry.
Six years before the debut of The Clare, Orville Wright's Military Flyer dazzled Alexandrians during tests on Shooter's Hill, the present-day site of the George Washington National Masonic Memorial.
Only six years earlier, Orville Wright had dazzled Alexandrians gathered on Shooter’s Hill, the present-day site of the George Washington National Masonic Memorial, during the first demonstration flight of his “Military Flyer” for the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps. “At first it was suggestive of a vampire in the offing, but it was becoming larger every second,” reads a breathless account of Wright’s over-flight in a 1909 Gazette article.
“The crowd was greatly enthused and cheered widely as the aeronauts drew near the hill.” The city’s early brush with powered flight planted seeds in a population eager to jump into the aviation business. Over the next two decades after Orville Wright’s flight, Alexandrians would make a series of attempts to break into the aircraft manufacturing business, starting with the Clare as perhaps the most ambitious — and ultimately tragic — of them all. As pre-flight preparations continued for several days after the Clare appeared on the riverbank, hundreds descended on the Alexandria waterfront from all over the region to gawk at the unusual sight.
For the city, the success of the Clare would transform Alexandria into a key manufacturing center in the nascent aviation industry a year before such aviation legends as Boeing appeared in Seattle and six years before Douglas set up shop in southern California. Richardson had revealed plans to create a manufacturing business called the Spanish American Trading Company in the old Pioneer Mills factory on the waterfront. He wanted to use the factory to assemble Clare seaplanes for a broad clientele, including militaries and airlines. Leon Rasst, who was described by the Gazette as a well-known agent for the Russian embassy, was sighted among the crowd of onlookers that week, along with a delegation of officials from the U.S. Navy’s procurement staff.
In the lead-up to the day of the first flight from the river, local journalists struggled to restrain their optimism for the Clare.
“The Richardson machine, as it rests in the water, looks as if it was thoroughly capable of carrying out the purpose of its inventor,” a writer for the Gazette wrote in the June 21, 1915 edition of the local newspaper.
Richardson’s contemporaries in the aircraft design field, however, may not have been so generous. Aviation technology was developing rapidly at the beginning of only the second decade of powered flight’s existence. In many ways, the design of the Clare seemed to be taking a step back rather than forward. In terms of size and length, the closest rival to the Clare was already flying in Russia.
The Ilya Muromets S-22 designed by Igor Sikorsky, who later founded the eponymous helicopter company after immigrating to the United States, entered World War I as a bomber, but was conceived as a luxury passenger transport. Sikorsky’s four-engined biplane featured an enclosed, interior cabin, which could carry up to 16 passengers in wicker chairs. The passenger cabin was heated and even included a toilet.
No such creature comforts are visible on the Clare. The design revealed few of the lessons the fledgling aviation industry had absorbed in the decade after the Wrights’ first flight. The horizontal and vertical surfaces used to control the aircraft in pitch and yaw were placed both forward and aft of the lift-creating wings, much like Wright brothers’ original design in 1903.
But the aviation industry had already moved on, with the vast majority of new designs by 1915 featuring a standard lay-out that placed the wings forward and the control surfaces for pitch and yaw on the tail. Most of the Clare’s contemporaries in 1915 also came with enclosed cockpits and cabins to shield the crew and passengers from the airstream and weather.
Having chosen “Spanish American Trading Company” as a brand name, perhaps Richardson envisioned his design as forming a future, cargo-carrying fleet, ferrying goods between, say, Key West and Havana.
The Clare carried enough fuel for a three-hour flight, according to a 1915 article in The Washington Times. If the propulsion system could achieve an average speed of 60 mph, as expected, Richardson’s seaplane could travel 180 miles. But first Richardson needed to prove his 2,300-pound Clare could fly. Although multiple off-the-shelf propulsion options existed, Richardson had selected a local supplier to design a new engine from scratch. Unfortunately, the Clare’s twin, six-cylinder, Emerson engines weighed 325 pounds and generated 68-horsepower each, resulting in a contemporaneously poor power-to-weight ratio of nearly 4.8 pounds per horsepower.
The Emersons fared poorly in 1915 even compared to the Curtiss V-2-3 engine, which were widely criticized as inefficient for offering a power-to-weight ratio of less than 4. Perhaps unsurprisingly, hours of waiting for a first flight turned into days, and Richardson’s under-powered, obsolete design remained moored in the river at the foot of Duke Street. Finally, the Clare’s engines fired up on the morning of June 21, a Tuesday.
As Emerson’s engines cranked up to full power at an ear-deafening 900 revolutions per minute, a six-member crew piloted by Dean Van Kirk steered the Clare upriver toward Washington at up to 20 miles per hour, but only for about 1.5 miles. The aircraft stopped in the current as the engines sputtered, prompting some lunch-hour maintenance. A second attempt proved slightly more successful.
“The engines worked more evenly and the plane skimmed along the surface of the water at a speed of thirty miles an hour,” the Gazette reported on June 22. Alas, a key part sheared off, decoupling the rear propeller from the shaft supplying power from the engine. A boat was summoned to tow the Clare back to a berth at the Alexandria wharf owned by the Norfolk and Washington Steamboat Co.
The June 21 tests seemed to show Richardson’s project was making progress. But the test runs revealed that Emerson’s six-cylinder engines would not be enough. By early July, the Gazette reported that no further powered tests would be conducted on the Clare until Emerson could deliver more powerful, eight-cylinder engines. Unfortunately, the Clare remained at its berth on the Potomac, exposed to the mid-summer weather.
A furious lightning storm raged through northern Virginia on the afternoon of July 20. Lightning bolts struck a barn nine miles southwest of Alexandria in Fairfax County, destroying the structure and killing a stallion valued at $1,000. The storm also felled trees in Franconia, tore up telegraph lines and washed out roads. On the Alexandria wharf, the storm lifted the Clare from its berth and sent it tumbling down the river.
Workers managed to retrieve the engines, but the aircraft was a total loss. “Whether or not the machine will be rebuilt has not yet been decided,” the Washington Herald reported on July 21. No record exists to explain the fate of the design of the Clare and plans for the Spanish American Trading Company, but the storm likely destroyed the city’s first bid for a place in aviation history.
