The Flight of Imagination: Sam Cody’s Great Adventure
Franklin Samuel Cowdery was born with a vivid imagination. When he came of age, he dreamed up a new identity for himself and became Samuel F. Cody. If that name evokes an image of Buffalo Bill Cody, the great wild west showman, it’s no coincidence. Sam Cody was in the same business, sported the same goatee, long hair and waxed mustache, and sometimes claimed to be related to his namesake, who was a generation older.
Cody was born in Birdville, Texas in 1861. Growing up on his father’s ranch, he learned to ride, lasso, shoot, and tame horses. Tragically, his family was killed by Indians while he was away from home. Left on his own, he plunged into a life of cattle drives, gold prospecting and such like adventures.
It was all hooey. In reality, he had been born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1867, his father a struggling carpenter and Civil War veteran. Sam may have worked as a cowboy, and he may have panned for gold, but his legendary exploits forever obscured his real life. He was a man who, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. “
In 1888, at the age of twenty-one, Sam joined the “Circus and Wild West Show” mounted by Adam Forepaugh, an early competitor of Buffalo Bill. Two years later, Cody married Maud Maria Lee. The couple formed a trick-shooting act, which in late 1890 they took to England.
The English, and Europeans in general, had a fascination with the exotic “wild” American West. Cody and his wife, advertising themselves as “The Champion Pistol Shots of the World,” toured the country to great acclaim. They also staged a Western melodrama on roller skates. They claimed to be the “son of the Great Buffalo Bill and his sister.” Buffalo Bill Cody sued them to stop them from using the designation.
But Sam Cody was irrepressible. He met an English woman named Lela King and got Maud to teach the art of pistol shooting to King’s four sons from a previous marriage. Soon Maud returned to America, where for a time she performed as a parachutist. Lela began to be known as Mrs. Cody. During the 1890s the new Cody family traveled around Europe with a show that featured various Western skills. For a while he cashed in on the rage for bicycling by racing champion bicycle riders, with Sam on horseback.
Cody also mounted a melodrama, which he wrote, called “The Klondyke Nugget.” Lela and her sons pitched in to act and paint scenery as they toured English music halls. With the worldwide fervor over the Yukon gold rush at its peak, the show became enormously popular.
Using the money he made in the theater, Cody pursued a longtime interest in kites. He claimed he had learned about them from a Chinese cook on a cattle drive. He built large bamboo and silk box kites. By joining them in a series along a length of piano wire he was able to lift a person into the air. He proposed that the British military, then fighting the Boer War, could use the contraptions for observation. The balloons they employed at the time did not tolerate strong winds. The army hired him and eventually purchased several of the kite arrays.
Cody also adapted kites for gathering weather data. During one experiment, he sent one to an altitude of 14,000 feet, a record. Because of the feat, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society in 1902. With British government backing, Cody experimented with gliders and powered kites for the army. When the military shifted their interest to lighter-than-air ships, Cody also worked on the forerunners of dirigibles.
In 1903, the Wright Brothers achieved the first powered flight of a heavier-than-air craft. But the English military saw little future in the invention. Cody, having learned a good deal about aeronautics, pursued work on an airplane at his own expense. By 1908, he had constructed a prototype. That year, he accomplished the first powered flight in the United Kingdom.
He continued to improve his airplanes, all the while employing his show business skills to generate interest. In 1910 he competed in a race around Britain. He stopped frequently to deliver lectures to large crowds on the way to finishing fourth. He achieved a continuous flight of almost five hours that same year.
Cody became the leading authority on aviation in Britain. He increased the size and capacity of his planes and invented one of the earliest flying ambulances. In 1912, a monoplane he constructed was damaged by a collision with a cow, an odd reminder of his cowboy roots. The farmer won a lawsuit for damages.
Sam was always eager to take passengers into the air with him, and many were interested in the unique adventure of flying. In August 1913, a noted cricket player named W.H.B. Evans accompanied him on a flight over an English golf course. The plane disintegrated in the air and the two men, neither of them strapped in, fell to their deaths.
Known as the father of British aviation, Sam Cody was buried with full military honors —an estimated hundred thousand Britons attended his funeral. His imagination had taken him on quite a journey during his forty-six years of life.
Amazing! I wonder if he was also a woman.....
Wow! Sam Cody sure did live an adventurous life in a very short time. I love the history you share Jack. As always, thank you.