When mavericks flew over Madras skies more than a century ago

All through history, man had watched birds with envy and longed to fly with them. The history of flying extends to the earliest forms of aviation such as jumping from towers with latched-on wings. Most of them, obviously, ended in grave tragedies.

Two bicycle mechanics, the Wright brothers, are credited with inventing, building and flying the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft, in 1903. 

Just seven years after that momentous occasion, on 10 March, 1910, a biplane was demonstrated in Madras. And a young boy who was among those who gathered to watch the spectacle became the first Asian to fly.

The story has its beginning in faraway Messina, Sicily, where Giacomo Maria De Angelis was born in 1844 to a middle-class family of book sellers. Not seeing much future in book trade, his father shrewdly sent him to France to learn baking and pastry making. 

In the second half of the 19th century, Giacomo decided to move to India, where he worked as a confectioner, taking advantage of the respectable standing that Italians had in India as expert chefs.

Though the original surname was De Angelis, it was misspelled as D’Angelis when the family moved to India. In 1875, when the Duke of Buckingham was appointed Madras Governor, Giacomo became his confectioner. With this influential link, Giacomo soon launched his new business — a confectionary shop called Maison Française, which specialised in French and Italian cakes, pastries and chocolate. 

By 1906 he was running the best hotel in Madras, Hotel D Angelis on Mount Road (the building is right now being demolished). Giacomo was also very interested in new technologies. His was the first hotel in the region to have electric lift, hot water taps, electric fans, imported tiles and an in-house ice-making plant. In 1903, the world was enamoured with the Wright brothers’ achievement. There was much associated risk. In 1908, for instance, a Wright flight crashed, killing a passenger and dislocating Orville’s hip. But that didn’t stop people all over the world from fabricating their own contraptions to take off to the clouds.

D’Angelis, too, dreamt of flying and soon found a collaborator in the European community of Madras – Samuel John Green. . In 1903, the same year Wright brothers flew, this supervisor of carriage-building at the Simpsons’ had developed a steam-driven car, the first motor car to be made in India.

Green and D’Angelis had a great volume of advertisements and newspaper articles on how a plane could be built but nothing else. Their road map was provided by European magazines, which had described the plane of Louis Blériot, the first to fly across the English Channel in July 1909. They soon engineered a contrivance with a small horse-power engine, took it by bullock cart to Pallavaram. Between the hills, they successfully piloted the first powered airplane flight in all of Asia. Incidentally, Madras would set up its first aerodrome in near the same spot much later.

Sure that their machine was going to fly, D’ Angelis arranged a public viewing in March 1910 and chose for it the most visible of locations in Madras - adjacent to Fort St. George. It was the island in the middle of the Cooum just before the river joined the sea.

The news that a man was about to fly spread like wildfire and a huge crowd gathered although D’Angelis was charging entrance fees to the demonstration. Amid roars of wonder, the plane took off from the island grounds and flew over the sea before turning to land.

He then decided to offer a chance to fly for one in the crowd. At least one boy was courageous enough to accept D’Angelis invitation to fly with him, though several from the crowd shouted warnings to him that he would break his skull. The young boy, Vasan, was the first Asian to have flown in history and later worked in the Kolar Gold Fields.

The local newspapers reported the exhibition widely, so did ‘India’ newspaper edited by Subramania Bharati, which wrote about the plane that was built by Tamil workers in the workshop of Simpsons. Today Asia’s airlines carry one-third of world passenger traffic but Madras was where Asia’s first plane flown.

Perhaps it isn’t really a surprise because colonial Madras was technologically superior to much of the world and already had the history of laying the first railway tracks in India, and the first custom built car and bus as well.

The writer is a historian and an author