On a Tuesday evening in September 1909, in the hills behind Piedmont, California, a Chinese machinist took off in a biplane he had designed, built and powered with an engine he had also built, and flew an elliptical circuit around a hilltop for about twenty minutes into a strong wind.

He came down when the bolt holding the propeller to the shaft sheared. The aeroplane dropped tail-first. He was bruised.

Three years later, in front of a thousand people outside Guangzhou, he pulled up too steeply and did not survive it.

Seven Years in the Shipyards

He was born into a poor farming family in Enping, Guangdong, the youngest of several children, three of whom had already died. He went to America at about twelve with a maternal uncle.

Then came seven years in New York-area shipyards, power plants and machine shops, working as an apprentice and a labourer while teaching himself English and mechanics. He built pumps, pile-drivers, generators and wireless sets. He came back to San Francisco in 1906 to run a machine business, and the earthquake pushed him across the bay to Oakland.

His first workshop was a shack ten feet by eight. He rarely stopped work before three in the morning. Chinese businessmen in Oakland backed him — one contemporary account has three of them putting up $750 between them — and a restaurant keeper from Ninth Street helped him assemble the aircraft.

He had the engine castings made by different machine shops on the East Coast and assembled them himself, so that nobody could work out the design. Guards were posted round the field.

Twenty Minutes at Twelve Feet

Der Oakland Enquirer of 23 September 1909 reported that he had flown on Tuesday — which was the 21st — at about six in the evening. The subhead read: MOTOR AND AEROPLANE ARE OF HIS OWN BUILD.

Two details are worth correcting, because they have propagated. The aircraft is often described as a sesquiplane with a 25-foot upper wing and a 6 ft 3 in lower one. The primary source actually says two planes, each 25 feet long and 6 feet 3 inches broad, one above the other — span and chord, not two different spans. It was a conventional biplane.

And the date. Chinese commemorations use 22 September, but the newspaper says Tuesday, and 22 September 1909 was a Wednesday. The 21st is the better-evidenced date.

The witnesses were his three Chinese helpers, a young disciple and a few local farmers.

The First Flight in California?

Der Enquirer’s second story that day was headlined CHINESE AVIATOR FIRST TO FLY ON COAST, and no earlier powered flight in California has surfaced to contradict it. The first American air meet, at Dominguez Field near Los Angeles, was in January 1910 — four months later.

The claim needs one qualifier, though. John J. Montgomery had been flying gliders at Otay Mesa as far back as 1883, and balloon-launched gliders at Santa Clara in 1905. Those are heavier-than-air flights, and they came first.

So the defensible statement is the first recorded powered aeroplane flight in California, and on the American West Coast. Which is still remarkable, and was achieved by a man who had arrived as a twelve-year-old immigrant labourer.

Not everyone in America found it charming. One newspaper account of the period, quoted by Smithsonian, caught the mood exactly.

An English-language summary of Feng Ru’s career.

Going Home

Sun Yat-sen asked him to come back. He sailed on the SS China in February 1911 with six countrymen from Oakland and a biplane of his own construction, twenty-nine and a half feet long, and reached Hong Kong on 21 March 1911.

In Guangzhou the firm was renamed the Guangdong Aircraft Company with Feng as chief engineer. After the revolution of November 1911 the Guangdong revolutionary government made him its chief of aviation. In March 1912 he completed an aircraft similar to his Feng Ru No. 2 — the first aeroplane built in China.

Yantang, 25 August 1912

He was flying an exhibition at the Yantang parade ground outside Guangzhou, in front of about a thousand people. He climbed to something like thirty-six metres, flew perhaps eight kilometres south-east, pulled up too steeply, stalled and went in.

He died of his injuries in hospital. He was twenty-nine.

He was given a military funeral and a posthumous rank of major general, and buried at the Huanghuagang mausoleum among the martyrs of the 1911 revolution. The tomb inscription names him as a pioneer of Chinese aviation. His reported last words — that his death should not check his colleagues’ spirit of enterprise, because this was a stage that had to be passed — are widely quoted but rest on second-hand accounts, so are best given as reported rather than documented.

What survives of him is scattered. A memorial meeting was held at the crash site a month after his death; a monument went up there in 1988. A bust stands at Beihang University in Beijing, inscribed with a line attributed to him about the aeroplane being the supreme weapon of war and his vow to master it or die trying. A replica of the Feng Ru No. 2 is at the China Aviation Museum.

And on 21 September 2009, a hundred years after the flight, a bronze bust of him was unveiled at Laney College in Oakland — on ground where one of his workshops had stood.

A Chinese television documentary on Feng Ru.

Sources: Oakland Enquirer, 23 September 1909, Oakland History Room collection; The New York Times, 21 February 1911; Rebecca Maksel, “The Father of Chinese Aviation”, Smithsonian Air & Space, 2008, quoting historian Patti Gully; Chinese and English Wikipedia; Oakland Public Library.