The Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics

In the middle of the 1920s, aviation in America was emerging from its long period of confusion and stagnation. But aviation in Europe had captured the imagination of the people and of industry almost immediately after the Wright brothers’ tour of Europe in 1908-9, and it still led the way. The United States government had been significantly involved in promoting aviation at least since 1918 with subsidy and direct investment in infrastructure, and in 1926 it would begin to legally promote safety
and standards in aviation in order to boost the public confidence. But the job was big. The list of individual citizens with ardent interests in aviation in the 1920s was long, and the record of their contributions was even-then impressive. Corporate America, as well, had shared in the promotion and advancement of aviation. But the going was still slow.

One of the more beneficial byproducts of the American system of private enterprise is the philanthropic activity of its successful practitioners. The giving of one’s time, interest, and assets to causes of one’s choosing is a time-honored tradition in America. The Guggenheim family of New York made its money in the mining industry. In 1924, Daniel Guggenheim and his wife, Florence, established a foundation to promote a variety of charitable causes. One of their sons, Harry Guggenheim, was a pilot during World War I and became com­mitted to the advancement of aviation. Father and son established, in 1926, a separate fund called the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, and by 1930 the family had given almost $3 million to aviation-related projects.

The Guggenheims believed, like the government, that the public would embrace air travel if confidence could be established in its safety. A significant part of the safety of air travel depended on reliably designed and constructed aircraft, yet there was no such thing as what we now know as an aeronautical engineer in 1925. The Guggenheims began to fund the establishment of schools at universities across the country, and by 1929 aeronautical engineering programs or research centers had been set up at the California Institute of Technology, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, Syracuse, Northwestern, the University of Michigan, and others.

In 1927, the Guggenheims offered a prize of $100,000 for the construction of safe aircraft in a contest called the “Safe Aircraft Competition.” The prize went to the Curtiss Tanager, which had incorporated into its design the first short takeoff and landing (STOL) characteristics, including reduced stall speeds, ever demonstrated.

The Fund subsidized an operation in California by Western Air Express (WAE) in 1928 known as the “Model Airway,” between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Airmail was not carried on this route since no award had been made by the Post Office to WAE. Instead, the airline carried only passengers along the corridor in an effort to show that commercial passenger service was feasible without airmail subsidies, as well as safe and reliable. The Fund provided a Fokker F-10 Super Trimotor to WAE for this scheduled service and had implemented a weather-reporting regimen along the route that utilized two-way radio. This was the first PIREPS (pilot weather reporting system) in history. The passenger operations ended in 1929, and although the experiment was not profitable, it did demonstrate that passenger – only (non-airmail) service could be feasible and popular with the public, at least between certain population centers. At a time when one of the most frequent causes of airplane crashes was allocated to adverse weather conditions, not one weather-related incident was recorded. Upon the termination of the experiment in June 1929, the weather bureau assumed the reporting of aviation weather locally, and the practice ultimately spread all across the country.

When Charles Lindbergh, in 1928, suggested that it would be helpful to navigation if the names of cities and towns could be painted on the roofs of large buildings, the Guggenheims funded the cost. The Postmasters of some 8,000 communi­ties arranged for the painting on rooftops of their towns’ names in large letters, with arrows point­ing to the north and, if available, to the nearest landing field.

The Guggenheims made a very significant contribution to advances in instrument flying by funding research involving gyroscopic instru­mentation invented by Elmer Sperry (directional gyrocompass and artificial horizon) and Paul Kolls – man (precision altimeter). Guggenheim-funded engineers worked with the Aeronautics Branch of the Commerce Department and the Bureau of Standards to advance radio navigation, and with Jimmy Doolittle to test and implement instrument procedures in 1929 that made safe instrument flight routine within a decade.