The instigator of the "Mt. Carmel Airship Hoax" reported in last week’s Valley Advance was a fascinating scoundrel named Edward J. Pennington. "The man is as much of a scientific curiosity as his airship," correctly observed the Chicago Times.

Pennington was described as a neatly-dressed, intelligent and studious-looking man of about 30 years old.

Though he spoke glibly of the latest aeronautic theories of Prof. Octave Chanute, he was remarkably ungrammatical saying, "We have went," "I’m agin it," and "There ain’t no difference." Perhaps it was Pennington’s sober demeanor which caused so many to believe in him.

One newspaper said he looked enough like the Rev. Samuel J. McPherson, noted clergyman of the day, to be his brother. Pennington was deliberate in speech and movement. The most incredible statements seemed credible when delivered in Pennington’s characteristic low, monotone. He seemed so sincere.

E.J. Pennington came originally from Indiana. (He was not related, though, to the Edward Pennington who lived in Vincennes at the time.) Pennington’s earliest ventures were made in small towns in Indiana and Ohio, where, as one newspaper put it, "he furnished experience and others furnished capital, with a reversal of conditions at the finish."

In 1883 he built a factory at Centerville, Ohio, and organized half a dozen companies. Then the bottom fell out and Pennington moved on. He repeated at Defiance, Ohio. At Ft. Wayne he organized three companies with big capital. At Oswego, Kansas, a million dollar company to manufacture freight elevators attested to his "Napoleonic financial genius." Then he located in Cincinnati and had a scheme for furnishing power for various industries. He married into a well-known family and tried to establish a million dollar wood-pulley factory, but failed to float the project.

Pennington next appeared in Mt. Carmel, Ill., in 1889 where he organized successively a $250,000 corrugated iron company, the Standard Machine Co., capital $100,000, and the Mt. Carmel Pulley Works, capital $100,000.

Then came his noted airship project. The Mt. Carmel Aeronautic Navigation Co. was organized in Chicago in 1890 with $20 million in capital, on paper. The flying machine was supposed to be all aluminum, 200 feet long, and capable of carrying 40 passengers at 250 mph.

A scale model of the projected airship was demonstrated at the Chicago Exposition Building to enthusiastic crowds, until an expert revealed in an article in Scientific American that the full-scale version couldn’t fly.

Pennington next was the promoter of a scheme to connect the larger towns of the Indiana gas belt with an electric railway. It also failed. Pennington was well-known at Vincennes, where he tried to work one of his schemes. He was best remembered by the shortness of his coat.

Pennington left this country about 1894, leaving his wife and several children in Arlington Place, Cincinnati. For a time his wife received long letters from Pennington, telling of the money he was making in London with his cycle motor and other wonderful schemes.

Subsequently, the letters came less frequently, until Mrs. Pennington for a long while received no word whatever. In desperation she went to London and found Pennington living with a Mrs. Marie Alice Durant, a rich Detroit woman, prominent in New York society until she deserted her husband and eloped with Pennington. They were living in the most elegant apartments in London.

Pennington soon identified himself with some of the big automobile companies. He sold some of his inventions and squandered several fortunes.

In 1898 he returned to this country, creating a furor in eastern social circles. Mrs. Pennington had him arrested, and the courts ordered him to contribute to the support of his family in Cincinnati.

While Durant was negotiating the terms of an amicable settlement, Pennington slipped out of the country and returned to England. In 1900 he married Mrs. Durant in Milwaukee.

The last mention of Pennington is in the May 18, 1901 Vincennes Daily Sun, which reported that he had been arrested in Philadelphia, while testing his latest invention, a "war automobile." Before police could stop him, he had caused several runaways, almost killed half a dozen pedestrians and barely escaped several collisions with street cars. The next mornng Pennington and his two assistants were fined $7.50 each, which he cheerfully paid. Pennington said that the Russian government had sent agents to see his new invention. The "war automobile" was a skeleton steel frame nine feet long, with seats for five soldiers, an engineer, and a speed regulator. Pennington claimed it would go 75 mpf on smooth roads, 130 on rails, and 30 in a ploughed field.

There were places for two machine guns at each end, and the entire upper front could be covered with armor plate.

The subsequent career of this real-life Tom Swift with his incredible inventions is unknown, though he was yet a young man in 1901.

As for the Mt. Carmel airship, the model was taken back to Mt. Carmel, thence to St. Louis and was last heard of in 1893, in Belleville, Ill. It is interesting to note that descriptions of the mysterious "airship of 1891" bore a marked resemblance to Pennington's ship. Perhaps the exhibition of it in St. Louis and Chicago in 1891 influenced the later sightings in 1897.

Actually, Pennington was not so far ahead of his time. In 1897 in Germany David Swartz built a 130,000 cubic foot aluminum-hulled airship. Like Pennington's ship it had an aluminum framework covered by aluminum sheeting. It was powered by a gasoline engine.

Swartz's airship crashed on its first flight, but inspired Count Ferdinand Zeppelin to build his successful aluminum-framed airship in 1900.

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EMAIL: rking@indian.vinu.edu