Bible-powered flight

The Wright Brothers were told more than once, “If God intended us to fly He would have given us wings.” Lacking wings, humans, including the Wright Brothers, turned to imagination and science.  If we couldn’t physically fly, we would build things— airships— that would fly for us. A number of people, including a few Texans, were among the first to give the notion a try.

One of those people, Rev. Burrell Cannon of Pittsburg, Texas, believed that God gave us a blueprint for flight right there, plain as day, in the Book of Ezekiel. Maybe it wasn’t actually all that plain to most people because Ezekiel is one of the more difficult books of the Bible to decipher, but Cannon felt he was on to something when he read: “Now it came to pass as I was among the captives by the River Chebar, the heavens were opened and I saw visions. Out of the fire came four creatures, and the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning. And their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.”

Cannon was intrigued. Aside from being a Baptist minister, he was a lumber mill operator in Pine. Like his father before him, who had a few patents to his name, Cannon was a tinkerer by nature. Intrigued by the wheel within a wheel, he read on:

“The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the color of beryl; and the four had one likeness. When they went they went upon four sides; and they turned not when they went. 

“And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them; and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up.

“And under the firmament were their wings straight, the one toward the other; every one had two, which covered on that side, their bodies. And when they went, I heard the noise of their wings, like great waters.”

Cannon interpreted this as God’s blueprint for human flight, so he went to work building and marketing what he called the Ezekiel Airship. He formed the Ezekiel Air Ship Mfg. Co. and sold $20,000 in stock to his neighbors. Construction took place in a local iron foundry. 

What emerged from the foundry was an odd contraption with large fabric-covered wings. A small gas engine turned four sets of vertical paddles mounted on a wheel within wheels, as the Bible had instructed. The wheels within wheels had vanes for lifting power; the wheels were supposed to lift the machine off the ground and vanes, or wings, functioned as gliders. It looked like a large kite and has been compared, in theory, to a helicopter.

It might have worked out pretty much the way Cannon planned it but it’s hard to know for sure because the first flight of the Ezekiel Airship, though widely reported, was never documented by anybody who actually saw it fly. Even Cannon didn’t see it fly; he was delivering a sermon at the time.  If it  flew when some people say it did, their flight pre-dated the Wright Brothers by a year. But that’s a mighty big IF.

According to the story, a few of the men who had worked on Cannon’s invention rolled the Ezekiel Airship out of the foundry one day in 1902.  Gus Stamps, the smallest member of the team, sat in the middle of the craft and revved the engine while a dozen or so men pushed it to get it going. The plane became airborne for a brief time—accounts vary as to how high it flew and how far it went. That it became airborne and traveled any distance at all was considered a rousing success.