| Notes |
- residing Dayton in 1930
JAMES MADISON HARRIS (JIM) JACOBS (1877 - 1944)
&
RUTH ANN VAN TILBURG (1892 - 1978)
AN EARLY AVIATION PIONEER AND INVENTOR
JAMES MADISON HARRIS (JIM) JACOBS was born on his parent's farm about a mile west of Yellow Springs in Miami Township of Greene County, Ohio, on January 28, 1877. His parents were JULIUS CICERO JACOBS and HANNAH MIRIAM JOHNSON. The oldest of their six children, some said that he was named after U.S. President James Madison. Others said that he was named after his great-grandfather, James Johnson, Sr. It is known that the "Harris" was to honor Dr. J. M. Harris of Yellow Springs who was present at Hannah's side at his birth. Perhaps the good doctor's full name was James Madison Harris!
After attending the Bee Hive grade school on the Dayton-Yellow Springs Road, not far from the family farm, JAMES (JIM) attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs for two years. After he graduated in 1896, he went to Dayton, Ohio, where he was employed by various companies, including the Barney Smith Car Works, building railroad passenger cars. Because of his woodworking skills, JIM soon was in charge of all of the inlaid woodwork in these cars. In 1908, a tremendous opportunity to become involved in the new field of aviation presented itself when Orville and Wilbur Wright began manufacturing airplanes to be used by their Wright Exhibition Team, putting on flying exhibitions at racetracks and fairgrounds across the nation. JIM jumped at the chance and he joined the Wright Company. There he helped to build all of the Wright airplanes from 1908 up through 1915. Among these early aircraft was the U.S. Army's first military airplane, accepted in 1909. Orville also taught him to fly, though he never became a skilled nor a licensed pilot, as pilot's license were not required in those days. JIM was very creative and was very interested in developing the airplane into a more useful means of transportation. One project toward this goal was the Wright Model CH, designed to operate from water. It was originally built with twin pontoons. One day in 1913, while Orville and JIM were testing this plane from a stretch of the Miami River south of Dayton known as Miami Shores, something went wrong and the plane plunged nose first into the water. Later, in recalling this incident, Orville related: "When I managed to untangle myself from the maze of wire, struts and canvas in the 30-foot deep water, I suddenly became concerned about JIM. So I yelled out down there: 'JIM, are you all right?'" Never once did Orville crack a smile as he related this incident, leaving it to the listener to discover the ludicrousness of his statement. Also in 1913, another new interest came into JIM'S life. She was RUTH ANN VAN TILBURG, the daughter of Dr. CHARLES GLESSNER VAN TILBURG and CATHERINE WHISLER of Hayesville, Ohio. RUTH had been born on her maternal grandparent's homestead farm in Milton Township of Ashland County Ohio, on August 16, 1892. She attended grade school and high school in Hayesville, where her father practised medicine for over 40 years. In about 1910, RUTH'S uncle, David Brubaker Whistler, had become established in business in Dayton, Ohio, where he saw opportunities for his various relatives. Among those who came was RUTH, who soon entered the Miami Valley Hospital School of Nursing in 1911 at the age of 17. Interestingly, when she graduated from the school on May 13, 1913, there were 13 graduates in her Class of 1913. JIM met RUTH while she was working in the hospital and he was a patient there. In fact, she said that he re-entered the hospital several unnecessary times just so she could be his nurse. After a two-year courtship, JIM and RUTH were married on March 26, 1915, in Dayton, Ohio, by Reverend C. A. Hirschman. One of the prized posessions that JIM received from Orville Wright was his 1913 Franklin roadster. To make the transfer legal, Orville sold it to him for $1. It was a very revolutionary automobile for its day. It featured an aluminum body with a torpedo-shaped rear end. In addition, it had an air-cooled engine that employed aluminum cylinders with integral cooling fins. It was also a convertible, with a fold-down canvas top. It was, indeed, a very classy car for its day and heads turned everytime it passed someone. Many years later, after World War II, RUTH sold it to an antique car collector in Massachusetts. In May 1916, JIM was at the Wright Company School at Mineola, New York, when Orville Wright asked him to go to Boston and set up the Wright's first successful airplane for a display at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After the last of plane's four successful powered flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903, it was standing unguarded on the ground. Suddenly a gust of wind lifted it from the ground and rolled it over. The front elevators and rear rudders were severly damaged, and some other parts were broken. When the Wrights returned the plane to Dayton in shipping boxes, they were stored in a shed in the rear of the Wright Bicycle Shop. The plane, still boxed, suffered heavy damage from mud and water during the 1913 Dayton flood. Later, the boxes were stored in a new laboratory Orville had built on North Broadway in Dayton. When they were opened in 1916, the front elevators and rear rudders were rebuilt, the main spars of the center sections of the wings were made new and a number of other parts were repaired.
When JIM set the first Wright airplane up at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1916, it was the first time it had been exhibited since its historic first flights. Later he set it up at the New York Aero Show in 1917, at the Society of Automotive Engineers meeting in Dayton in 1918, again at the New York Aero Show in 1919, then in the hangars of the Dayton-Wright Airplane Company for the purpose of obtaining testimony in the Montgomery vs. the United States and the Wright-Martin Company suit, and finally at the 1924 National Air Races at Wilbur Wright Field in Dayton. Meanwhile, with the outbreak of war in Europe in 1915, the Dayton- Wright Airplane Company was formed in Dayton by Edward A. Deeds, Charles F. Kettering and Harold E. Talbott to produce warplanes for the Allies in Moraine City, south of Dayton. The company first produced Standard SJ-1 training biplanes. Then it began producing the English-designed DeHaviland DH-4 as a corps observation plane and a light bomber. It was powered by the American-designed Liberty engine. In fact, it was the only Allied combat aircraft built in the United States during World War I. All the rest were built in England and France. Late in the war, it also produced several prototype USD-9 day bombers. JIM joined this new aircraft organization in early 1917 as the Supervisor of Experimental Production under Consulting Engineers Orville Wright and Charles Franklin Kettering, and Chief Engineer J. M. Schoonmaker, Jr. When the Armistice came in November 1918, Dayton-Wright's 8,000 employees were turning out 40 warplanes a day. In all, the company produced 400 SJ-1 trainers and 3,100 DH-4 light bombers. A booklet by Ronald V. Hutchinson, titled "Skylarking," recites many fascinating and humorous episodes involving JIM and other early aviation pioneers with the Dayton-Wright Airplane Company. However he left more important marks of his creativity. These include the following patents:
1,342,385, filed Sept 1, 1917, on a "Steering Device" for an airplane.
1,452,641, filed Sept 20, 1918, on an "Aeroplane Wing."
1,441,984, filed Sept 20, 1918, on an aircraft "Fuselage."
1,298,080, filed Sept 23, 1918, on an aircraft "Self-sealing Gasoline
Tank." It prevented an aircraft's gasoline tank from exploding when hit
by incendiary bullets.
1,509,297, filed Dec 12, 1921, on a "Pontoon Skid" for aircraft that
enabled it to land on land or water.
1,504,663, filed May 31, 1921, on an "Airplane." This pioneer invention
with Orville Wright as co-inventor, was a basic one for changing the
configuration of an aircraft wing that is evident in today's aircraft in
the form of high lift flaps and landing flaps that provided a tremendous
improvement in their take-off and landing safety.
1,439,419, filed Feb 15, 1922, on a "Stepladder." This was a fundemental
improvement in ladder safety, variations of which are still on the market.
After the war, the Dayton-Wright Airplane Company continued to pursue the military aircraft business. It built thirteen TW-3 trainers powered by air-cooled engines, two TW-3 trainers with water-cooled engines, and one small M-1 Messenger aircraft. One of its most advanced planes was its XPS-1 Alert Pursuit, a high-wing monoplane featuring a hand-operated retractable landing gear designed by JIM. It was the later-to-be-famous Jimmy Doolittle, then a test pilot at McCook Field near Dayton, who used the XPS-1 to pull one of his classic flying jokes on the innocent people of Dayton. Realizing that a high-wing monoplane with a retractable landing gear had never been seem by most of Dayton's air-minded citizens, he mounted a false landing gear atop the wing. Then he painted a false cockpit on the belly of the plane and fastened the torso of a dummy pilot to it. Taking off, he cranked up the landing gear and cruised at treetop level all over Dayton. To the innocents below, it looked like he was flying upside down. The stunt fooled most of the onlookers, but for weeks afterwards the commander of McCook Field received telephone calls and letters begging him to tell them if the plane was really flying upside down. After the war, Dayton-Wright's executives thought that the era of public flying had finally arrived. In fact, they developed a series of planes for the postwar market. These included the K-T Cabin Cruiser having a top speed of 120 miles per hour, the luxurious O-W Aerial Coupe, and the Nine Hour Cruiser. Another special project was the R. B. Racer built for the Pulitzer Trophy Race. A high-wing monoplane one of its unique features was the retractable landing gear that JIM had designed. Although it was cranked up and down by hand, it was another first in non-military aviation. In 1919, the Dayton-Wright Airplane Company was acquired by the General Motors Corporation. It saw new opportunities in the transportation market and also wanted the talented men of Dayton-Wright on its payroll. But the venture was doomed by the flood of post-war aircraft that came onto the market. A brand-new Curtiss JN-4 trainer or a DeHaviland DH-4 could be bought for a few hundred dollars. As a result, in 1923 General Motors sold its interests in the company to the Consolidated Aircraft Company. However,it hung on to its key innovative people. Within a few months, General Motors formed the General Motors Research Laboratories in Dayton under the talented leadership of Charles Franklin "Boss" Kettering. JIM worked there developing improved carburetors and engine cooling systems for the company's expanding line of automobiles and trucks for several years before the Laboratories were moved to the General Motors Building complex in Detroit in 1927. However, he decided and to move his family there and commuted to Dayton to spend the weekends with his family. Meanwhile, at G. M. Research, he continued to evidence his ingenuity and was awarded several more patents on his inventions. It was during this period that JIM'S sons, Robert Harold, Russell Lowell and JAMES WILBUR, began making toy gliders out of small quart strawberry boxes that he had collected. When JIM discovered this, and saw how appealing such gliders were to youngsters, he told his boys that if they would stop using up his strawberry boxes, he would build them a much better glider. After about a year's work, JIM perfected a small glider made of balsa wood that was launched into the air by a rubber-band shooter stick. His efforts resulted in Patent No. 1,852,307, filed on May 31, 1928, and titled "Toy Airplane Or The Like." The toy airplane was so appealing that the Miami Wood Specialty Company on Front Street in Dayton, owned by Loren Wright, a brother of Orville and Wilbur Wright, put it into production. The first order for this toy was for one million by Quaker Oats. It was one of the first premiums that it put in its round cereal box to help boost sales during the years of the Great Depression. In fact, the Miami Wood Specialty Company operated on a three- shift basis during those difficult years producing this toy, and offsprings of it, for a great variety of manufacturers and retailers. Every boy, worth his salt, had one of these gliders sometime during these trying years.The success of the toy glider led JIM to develop other toys , including a propeller-driven toy airplane, for which he received Patent 2,034,143 in March 1936. This was followed by a rotating glider, for which he received Patent 2,236,887 in April 1941. Then in December 1941, he received Patent 2,268,487 on an improved version of his original toy glider that featured foldable wings. It could be launched into the air like a rocket. Then when it reached the top of its flight, its wings snaped open and it made a long glide back to earth. JIM's final Patent 2,357,005 was not unlike the modern Space Shuttle, for it was launched into the air and at the peak of its flight the rocket would release a glider that would make a long glide back to earth. It his invention, however, the rocket was provided with a lifting rotor to return it safely to the ground.
Meanwhile, when Orville Wright decided to place the first successful powered airplane in the new Science Museum in South Kensington, England, because the United States' Smithsonian Institution had refused to recognize the Wrights as the inventors of the first successful airplane, he asked JIM to help him refurbish it to its original condition. In fact, only JIM, Orville and Orville's secretary, Miss Mable Beck, refurbished the plane. JIM did all the required woodworking and assembly, while Orville and Miss Beck laid out and cut the cloth coverings. Then after she did all of the necessary sewing, JIM re-covered the plane. When it was completely assembled, JIM took a photograph of it. It was then that JIM, with Orville's blessing, lifted up his eight-year old son, JAMES WILBUR and placed him in the pilot's cradle on the lowered wing so he play like he was flying the first successful airplane. Before JIM disassembled and crated the plane for shipment to England, Charles A.Lindbergh had made his epic flight from New York to Paris. When he returned, he visited Orville in Dayton and together they went to the Wright Laboratory on North Broadway in Dayton to inspect the refurbished first airplane. Then on March 20, 1928, it was put on public display when King George V and Queen Mary dedicated the new section of the Science Museum in South Kensington, England. Many years later, the Smithsonian Institution recanted its position and the Wright's first powered airplane was returned to the United States. Today it hangs in the honored place in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D. C. From the late 1920's to the early 1940's, JIM continued to be associated with Orville Wright and his brother, Loren Wright, and the Miami Wood Specialty Company. He supported his wife and family of five sons and one daughter from the royalties he earned from his toy airplane patents. He also managed his parents farm near Yellow Springs, after their deaths, for his brothers and sisters. There he took a great interest in keeping an apiary of 100 hives of bees. Here again his inate creativity came to the fore when he developed basic improvemnents in beehives and their accessories, which were put into production by the A. I. Root Company in Medina, Ohio, the world's largest manufacturer of bee-keeping supplies. After an illiness lasting about two years, JIM passed away on April 10, 1944, in the Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton and he was buried Section 3, Lot 606 of the Memorial Park Cenmetery north of Dayton. He had been a long-time member of the Knights of Phythias in Dayton. RUTH, however, survived JIM by almost 35 years. These were not sad ones. In her leisure years she expanded on her writing of poetry. One she had written earlier reflected her interest in aviation and her concern for pilots. It read:
I saw an airplane flying high
A tiny speck in the cloudless sky
Just for a second . . . then out of sight
Floating beauty . . . a man in flight
O God above, with infinite care
Watch over the pilot with wings, up there;
With abiding love and understanding
Guide him safely to a 'happy landing'.
RUTH also enjoyed wood carving and became an accomplished painter in oils. Her mother, Katherine, and sister, Marion, lived with her in Dayton until their deaths. "Grandma Jakie," as RUTH was called, enjoyed her grandchildren and great-grandchildren immensely in the latter years of her life. Vivacious and outgoing, she also thoroughly enjoyed and participated in many activities of the Dayton Senior Citizens Center. She always had a ready smile and a good word about everyone. She lived her life to the fullest until she suddenly passed away on June 20, 1978. Then she was buried beside her husband, JIM, in Grave 5, Lot 606, Section 3 of the Memorial Park Cemetery near Dayton.
MY PEDIGREE:
JAMES MADISON HARRIS JACOBS m RUTH ANN VAN TILBURG > JAMES WILBUR JACOBS
m BETTY JEAN STAMBAUGH.
REFERENCES:
1. Will; Julius Cicero Jacobs, Greene Co., Ohio.
2. Marriage License, James M. H. Jacobs to Ruth Ann Van Tilburg; 1915.
3. Ohio Certificate Of Death, Ruth Ann Jacobs, 1978.
James Wilbur Jacobs
1900 United States Federal Census about James Jacobs
Name: James Jacobs
Age: 23
Birth Date: Jan 1877
Birthplace: Ohio
Home in 1900: Miami, Greene, Ohio
Race: White
Gender: Male
Relation to Head of House: Son
Marital Status: Single
Father's Name: Cicero Jacobs
Father's Birthplace: Maryland
Mother's name: Hannah Jacobs
Mother's Birthplace: Ohio
|
1877 - 1944 (67 years)
[1] 
