The International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, has provided us with a picture of the Number 4 Panoram Kodak, the ingenious machine with which Isabel Walker Drake took the views of her Corning family (“An American Panorama,” April, 1975) When the button is pressed, the lens swivels to the left in a quick transit, setting down on film a large slice of whatever the camera is pointed at.
As Lincoln lay dying from an assassin’s bullet across the street from Ford’s Theatre through the grim night of April 14, 1865, frequent bulletins on his sinking condition clicked between the major American cities along the country’s spreading web of Morse telegraph wires. News of his death in the morning spread from city to city within minutes. Yet eleven days passed before the tragic tidings reached Great Britain and Europe when the steamship Nova Scotian from New York docked in England on April 26.
America has long been celebrated as a nation of inventive tinkerers. As President Grant’s patent commissioner remarked a century ago, “our merchants invent, our soldiers and sailors invent, our schoolmasters invent, our professional men invent, aye, our women and children invent.” On occasion one of these tinkerers among us is touched with enough genius to influence history. Glenn Hammond Curtiss is a case in point.
Glenn Curtiss was one of a select handful of true aviation pioneers. His eye-catching, record-breaking flights did more to make his countrymen air-minded than even the Wright brothers. He invented the first practical seaplane and flying boat and taught the United States Navy to fly. He was an innovator in aircraft construction, engines, and control systems. He led in founding the American aviation industry. Yet for all of that his career had its bumpy moments, most notably a bitter feud with the Wright brothers that shook the aeronautical world.
You can sum up the beginnings of natural history in America in one name: Bartram. John Bartram and his son William laid the groundwork for American botany and either directly or indirectly taught most of our early naturalists. Their combined lives spanned a hundred and twenty-four years. Sir Isaac Newton was still in his prime when John Bartram was born. Audubon was a young man and Thoreau a child when William Bartram died.
Glenn Curtiss’ triumph at the first international aviation contest, held at Rheims, France, evoked accolades for him from around the world, as well as this description of the event by Augustus Post in The Century Magazine of November, 1910.
The little group of figures below, who have composed themselves with such artless grace on a sun-dappled lawn beside a lake, were photographed in the first decade of this century by an ingenious camera called the Number 4 Panoram Kodak. It was manufactured in relatively small numbers between 1899 and 1907—and some still exist. The photographer simply levelled the camera by referring to a device like a carpenter’s level mounted on the top of it and pushed a button that made the lens swing from one side to the other by means of a spring. Inside, the lens rotated on its optical center, scanning the curved film through a slit. The view finders on these cameras were tiny and inadequate, which meant that the photographer really had no way of knowing what was going to be on the negative. We do not know whether our photographer relied more on her view finder or her intuition, but we do know she had a refined eye for artistic composition. This print, for instance, has about it something of the ambiance of the celebrated Renoirs painted in France at about this time and conveys the same sense of ease and insouciance.
A few years ago, when she was about seventy, Mildred Renaud took a creative-writing class in the adult-education program at the high school in Briarcliff Manor, New York, where she now lives. For class assignments she started writing an account of her childhood in Iowa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas at the beginning of this century. Her teacher, impressed with the vividness of her memory and the charm and authenticity of her presentation, suggested that she submit these memoirs to AMERICAN HERITAGE. We were moved by this uncomplaining, even cheerful, account of an austere childhood lived in a harsh land, and we are pleased to publish a portion of her manuscript—the first writing she has ever done.
When Mildred was three years old, her mother died, and after being shuttled around among various relatives she finally went to live with her maternal grandparents in ityoj. She had just had her sixth birthday when we take up her story—a story that reminds us how short American history really is.
--The Editors