The Welshman Who Got There Before The Wright Brothers

The world’s first powered flight took place in Pembrokeshire, not North Carolina!

In the early years of the twentieth century, one of man’s oldest dreams was finally realized: that of manned flight. History records that Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first powered and controlled flights on December 17th 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Their first flight was ground-breaking enough, but the second one lasted 59 seconds before their propellor-driven glider came to earth 250 metres from the take-off point — quite an achievement in those times. The two aviation pioneers were subsequently hailed as heroes, and were able to abandon their cycle business for more lucrative enterprises. Wilbur shipped the aircraft to France, where it was passionately received as a modern wonder of the world, and in 1909 Orville secured a contract to supply the US Army with his planes. It was a real American success story. But unknown to the Wright brothers, a humble Welsh carpenter named Bill Frost had already taken to the skies in a powered, heavier-than-air flying machine, some eight years before the historical flights at Kitty Hawk.

It all began around 1868 when 20-year-old Bill Frost was working on Hean Castle — an absurd Victorian folly. As he was carrying a 12-foot-long pine plank along scaffolding, a sudden fierce gust of wind rushed up under him and propelled the plank — and Frost — into the air. The carpenter landed gently, still clinging to the plank — and that airborne incident fired his imagination. From that moment on he was continually preoccupied with finding a way to invade the domain of the birds and clouds. The people of Saundersfoot, a village in southwest Wale, where Frost lived, laughed at his dream, just as the dullards of long ago had laughed at the futile flight attempts of Leonardo da Vinci and the dangerous balloon escapades of the Montgolfier brothers.

Even the men that were to go down in the official history of flight — the Wright brothers — were initially regarded as fools. For hours, the brothers would watch gannets gliding through the sky and imitate the birds by stretching out and tilting their arms. This provided ample amusement for the coastguards who used to watch the seemingly crazy, would-be aeronauts. So Bill…

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