Two wings and a prayer: one hundred years ago, in the tiny East Texas town of Pittsburg, the Reverend Burrell Cannon interpreted apocalyptic words in the Bible as instructions to build a flying machine. And he succeeded, sort of. Are the history books wrong about who was first in flight?

Publication: Texas Monthly

Publication Date: 01-JAN-03

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IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD, AND IT TOLD REVEREND Burrell Cannon to do something crazy. The source was Ezekiel, one of the old-time prophets of the Bible, who spoke of a vision of four winged humanoid creatures joined as one in a square, each facing outward like superheroes, and emerging from a fiery windstorm. Each being had four faces--a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle--and they were as bright as fire, flashing like lightning. "And they went every one straight forward: whither the spirit was to go, they went; and they turned not when they went." The creatures rode in a chariot whose wheels were--this was the most important part of the vision--"like a wheel inside a wheel," and stretching over it all was an arch and a throne: a chariot of the Lord.

If you're going to become obsessed with a vision, the Book of Ezekiel is a good place to start. Cannon, a late-nineteenth-century East Texas preacher, spent more than fifteen years poring over its ancient, inscrutable words, so arcane, according to fourth-century biblical scholar Saint Jerome, that in the old days Jews under thirty weren't allowed to read them. He understood that the Book of Ezekiel was sometimes read along with Revelation to foretell the Apocalypse. His own interpretation was less fiery but almost as astounding: a blueprint for man to fly, to get a little closer to heaven--and to make a little money. By the time the reverend, who was also a sawmill operator and an inventor, began building his Ezekiel Airship in a Pittsburg machine shop, in 1900, he had mapped out every spar, wheel, and wing that Ezekiel had revealed, and he had attracted dozens of investors, aiming to cash in on the most important invention of the impending modern age. Cannon finished the airship two years later, a giant flying machine with a 26-foot wingspan and wheels inside wheels, more Jules Verne than Old Testament.

And then, according to several witnesses, the thing flew. In 1922 a guy named Gus Stamps, who had worked on the airship, told the story of its flight just before he died to Morris Thorsell, the eldest son of the man who ran the machine shop. Fifty years after that, just before he died, Thorsell related the tale to Pittsburg historian Lacy Davis. Three decades later, one hundred years after that virgin flight, Davis told me what happened. It seems that in late 1902, a handful of men who had worked on the airship took it out for a test flight in a nearby pasture. "Stamps was elected to fly the thing," Davis said. "He got in, started it up. It lurched forward, rose up to about ten to twelve...

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