One of the great things about stamps is that they allow a country to show off interesting things that are going on there. Advanced countries possessed inventors changing the world and imagining the future. Here we have the story of Frenchman Clement Ader and his pre Wright brothers steam powered bat planes. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
The printers and engravers did a good job with this issue. The blue color tint gives Ader’s Avion III plane a more serious look. The reality was that the bat shaped wings were mostly beige linen stretched over a thin wood frame. Lite weight being so important to getting off the ground. By 1938 there were many types of airplanes, the stamp does well in showing how advanced the early work was and then still have room for the man behind it.
Todays stamp is issue A88, a 50 Franc stamp issued by France on June the 16th, 1938. It was a single stamp issue. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth $65 dollars used. There is another version on thicker paper in a darker shade of blue that would up the value to $77.50.
Clement Ader was born in Toulouse France in 1841. Toulouse is the future home of Airbus. He trained in electrical engineering and his early work was in the recently invented by Alexander Graham Bell telephone. He was in charge of installing the first telephone network in Paris in 1880. He went on to design a headset that would allow an audience to listen to an opera being performed with stereo sound. Pretty advanced for the nineteenth century.
In the 1880s Ader turned his attention to trying to achieve powered flight. For what the machine that gets off the ground might look like he carefully studied the shape of birds, specifically the bat. He designed a lightweight, 112 pound, steam powered 20 horsepower four cylinder engine powering a propeller. His plane the Ader Eole, got one foot off the ground for a distance of 160 feet. It was the first powered takeoff, but the flight itself was not under the control of the pilot Mr. Ader. Ader then attracted funding from the French Defense Ministry for a more developed effort. This plane, still bat shaped but much bigger with a 46 foot wingspan and 2 30 horsepower steam engines wan named the Avion III. This flew in 1897 but was blown off course by the wind. The government declared it a failure and pulled funding.
After a short stint building V8 powered race cars that did not find buyers, Ader continued to have influence on aviation. In 1910 he published a book imagining a future of aerial warfare. Among the imaginations were drawings of what an aircraft carrier might look like, with a large flat deck, ship functions from a small island, and aircraft elevators to take planes to the flight deck from the hanger deck below. The book was spotted by at American Naval Attaché in Paris and sent to America. where they influenced the design of the USS Langley, the first flush deck aircraft carrier.
Ader’s plane name Avion became the French word for air travel. Ader was also honored in his hometown where one of Airbus’s assembly lines was named for him.
Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast Clement Ader. With the value of this stamp, I can readily afford another round. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.