IN 1911 Professor Herbert Charles Sadler (Glasgow '93, D.Sc. hon. ibid. '02, LL.D. ibid. '27), chairman of the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, attended the first International Aviation Meeting at Boston, Massachusetts. Many of the great contemporary flyers, including the Wright brothers, Glenn Curtiss, Louis Bleriot, and Graham White, took part in the airplane races and exhibition flights held on that occasion.
Interest in aeronautics was traditional in Sadler's family, for his great-granduncle, James Sadler (1751-1828), of Oxford, was the first English balloonist, and the two sons of James Sadler, Windham and John, followed their father's hobby and career. J. E. Hodgson in his voluminous History of Aeronautics in Great Britain devoted an entire chapter to the Sadlers (Chap. VI, "The First English Aeronaut, James Sadler and His Sons").
Moreover, during his early teaching career at the University of Glasgow, Sadler had as his colleague Percy S. Pilcher, who was Otto Lilienthal's follower and the British pioneer in modern glider flying.
Upon his return from the aviation meeting in Boston Sadler reorganized the University of Michigan Aero Club. In the year 1911-12 the students built a small wind tunnel in the "mold loft" of the West Engineering Building and experimented with various kinds of craft. They also built a glider, patterned to some extent on the Wrights' biplane, and flew it as a kite in the hilly country surrounding Ann Arbor. Since they had had no aeronautical experience, they concentrated on controlling the rise and descent of their craft and on maintaining its longitudinal equilibrium, depending for the more difficult lateral equilibrium on two helpers standing on the ground and holding ropes attached to the wing tips. The ground helpers were often lifted into the air by sudden gusts of wind or by the pilot's abrupt use of the elevator control. Sadler helped and advised, repeating the warning given him by Wilbur Wright: "If you will advise them [the students] to build a glider and to fly it, do not let them build it too light."
In 1910 Felix Wladyslaw Pawlowski (Paris '10, M.S. Michigan '14), who had taken the first course in aeronautical engineering ever given, that of Lucien Marchis at the University of Paris, arrived in this country. He spent two years in Chicago as a designer for the automobile industries. In 1911-12 he wrote to a number of engineering colleges and technological institutes requesting an opportunity to develop courses in aeronautics. He received negative replies from most of them on the grounds that aviation "very likely" would never amount to anything. But he had two encouraging answers, one from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology expressing interest in the proposal, although declining it "for the present" because of lack of funds, and another from Dean Mortimer E. Cooley, which resulted in Pawlowski's appointment to the University of Michigan in 1913 as Teaching Assistant in Mechanical Engineering, with the understanding that later he would be permitted to introduce courses in aeronautical engineering. He became Instructor in 1914.
In view of the times and the stage of
