07-09 Glenn Curtiss Museum

Various people had told us the Glenn Curtiss Museum is one of the best attractions in the area, and they were right! Glenn Curtiss was an aviation pioneer. Click this link for more about him.

He started making bicycles as a teenager and became very successful with three stores in local towns. He advanced to making motorized cycles, designing and building the engines in his workshops.

On January 27, 1907 he became known as the “Fastest Man in the World” by riding the motorcycle seen below at a speed of 136.3 MPH at Ormond Beach, Florida.

A balloonist asked him to build an engine to power his balloon and that introduced Curtiss to aviation. He later joined a group, including Alexander Graham Bell, trying to build one of the first airplanes. That lead to the first public flight of an airplane in America with Curtiss at the controls of the “June Bug” on 7/4/1908. Here is a link to a video of a reenactment of that flight. The Wright Brothers had the first flight five years earlier. However they were very leery of the press and only a select few had every seen their plane fly. Below is a model of the “June Bug”. A full size replica is also in the museum.

He continued to make advancements in airplane design. Among many prizes he won was for the first flight from NYC to Albany over the Hudson River. Local volunteers restore Curtiss planes and build replicas in a workshop at the museum.

They are working on this replica of the plane that made the Hudson River flight. They plan to reenact this in the fall of this year.

Among his titles is “Father of Naval Aviation”. He was the inventor of the seaplane.

The museum workshop volunteers built and have flown this replica of one of Curtiss’s seaplanes called the “America”.

Curtiss developed the Curtiss JN-4D called the “Jenny”. Such pilots as Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart learned to fly in a Jenny. In WWI, 95% of American and Canadian pilots learned to fly in a Jenny.

The Wright-Curtiss P-40 was made famous in WWII by the Flying Tigers, a volunteer group of American pilots fighting in China.

After WWI, Curtiss branched out into other areas and became less directly involved in aviation. He became a Florida land developer. With friends he developed the communities of Hialeah, Miami Springs, and Opa-Locka.

He also was an early pioneer in the RV industry building the Curtiss Aerocar.

One of the aircraft companies he was associated with was Mercury Aviation. During slow times in the economy, the company added other products. I was surprised to see that they built this baby stroller. I’m pretty sure this is the kind my parents used when I was a baby. You could take off the handles and the foot rest on the bottom, and it became a walker.

There were other period things on display such as this organ which is similar to one my Grandmother played.

As I said earlier, this is a wonderful museum and well worth a visit. Allow several hours and use the headsets. They give a great explanation of the major exhibits.