“To Fly in the Clouds With the Safety of Birds”: Read All About It in the Los Angeles Express, 23 May 1873, Part Seven

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

We bring to a close this post, which began with a general look at the pages of the 23 May 1873 edition of the Los Angeles Express and then honed in on an advertisement for The Southern California Sanitary Hotel and Industrial College Association, which included F.P.F. Temple as treasurer and his Temple and Workman bank as the depository for the organization which was formed to create an institution to build a hotel for health-seekers coming to the Angel City, as well as a school to focus on certain industrial topics.

The originator of the concept was a recent arrival to town, Frederick Merrill (sometimes given as Moulton) Shaw, a Vermont native who first landed in California in 1849 during the Gold Rush and convinced Temple, Mayor James Toberman, nursery owner Thomas A. Garey and others that his plan was sound. He was provided some funds to travel to Europe to sell the idea and raise money, as well as to attend a world’s fair at Vienna, but little success was found.

Shaw returned to Los Angeles and, through most of 1874, tried to keep the life in his project going, but it soon died out. Retreating to a remote rustic residence in what became known as Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills section of the Santa Monica Mountains, this eccentric figure was widely known for his unorthodox lifestyle, further refinements for his proposals for hygienic households and artificial harbors and for being a prolific letter-writer to Angel City newspapers.

By the Boom of the 1880s, during which William H. Workman was mayor of Los Angeles, Shaw added another publicly pronounced preoccupation, this having to do with human flight, including his claim that his system of artificial wings would allow “human birds” to travel far distances, including across oceans (well, if they had steamers and other ships on which they could land for rest breaks and from which they could take off to resume their travels.)

It was certainly easy enough to comment critically and even caustically concerning Shaw’s concepts, but there were plenty of occasions in which his essays contained reasonable remarks about a wide variety of subjects beyond those above, including about farming, elections, women’s ownership of land, and more. By the end of the 19th century, as the Laurel Canyon philosopher or sage, as he was called, aged, there were fewer of these letters to the editors of the papers.

With the dawn of the 21st century, though, one notable reference concerned Shaw’s isolation and his desire to remarry, his previous matches not lasting long and two of which, the first nearly two decades involving a “telegraphic” marriage and the second, some five years previous, involving a 22-year old woman raised eyebrows and engendered a fair amount of ink for newspaper accounts. The Los Angeles Record of 1 March 1901 observed,

Colonel F.M. Shaw, who has attained some notoriety on account of his economic ideas, scientific discoveries and plans for the construction of a deep sea harbor off the coast of Southern California, and the development of an airship scheme, has another attack of matrimonial fever. He now wants to form an alliance with some woman of education and refinement who will serve as a counter to his own genius.

The paper reported that Shaw, who was 73 years old and moved from Laurel Canyon, perhaps having lost his land as there were unpaid taxes on it, to live next to the Plaza Church with one of his fellow lodgers being the destitute former merchant Adolph Portugal, whose store was in the Temple Block where Shaw’s Sanitary Hotel association was located at the same time, had his photograph taken recently and fixed his attention on an assistant deemed to be “a suitable companion for his old age,” but she, naturally, declined his offer. Then, it was reported “he spotted a servant girl in one of the public parks” as she took an infant through it and “plumped his heart at her feet, offering to go at once with her and be married if she would trundle the child into some safe place where it could be left until their return.”

After continuing that there were many others, who declined to offer their stories of Shaw’s amorous pursuits, the Record remarked that “if any woman hankers for a husband with large projects on his mind, they should apply to the professor” because such a union could easily and quickly be had as “he is so constituted as to take about anybody.” The paper printed a letter from the “Third Vice President and General Manager” of his People’s Ocean Steam Transit Company, situated in a downtown office, in which he wrote “to the latest object of his affection,” that, should she take him as a spouse, the unnamed woman could unite in marriage after he returned from a year of travel on company business.”

The blissful couple could then settle on his place nine miles from town where,

I am building a marble sanitary home to cost one million dollars . . .

The plans for the building, 150×100 feet, two stories . . . is in the form of a hollow square, portico all around, and inside patterns after the Acropolis of Athens, only in Doric style of architecture [hence his name of “Little Mount Olympus” for his Laurel Canyon domain]. The altitude where the house will be built is 1575 feet, at a point where two air currents meet, charged with oxygen and ozone to make an ideal element to prolong life to its utmost.

Obviously, Shaw’s search for a helpmeet went unfulfilled. A week prior, the Los Angeles Times, ran a feature on “professors of aerial navigation in this city,” including attorney C. C. White, said to have been a lawyer before falling on hard terms and who “is deeply troubled by the devil who urges him to revenge himself upon people who have done him injury” but who also “believes that the Lord directs all his fortunes or misfortunes.” White claimed to have designed his craft, which comprised two balloons with an eight-person car in the midst of them and the machine powered by two gas motors, but hoped to soon secure a patent, though, if this failed, “I will know that the Lord did not want me to succeed.”

Actually, said the paper, “it would be difficult to say how many flying-machine inventors there are in Los Angeles” as “almost every soaring genius has tried his hand at the machine-bird,” though it was decided to focus on White and Shaw were “caught on the wing” in their “flights of imagination,” which that Times followed by suggesting that “your flying-machine inventor generally flies that way.” It observed that Shaw “came out of his hollow tree” in Laurel Canyon to work on his Santa Monica-area artificial harbor before turning to his “human bird” model and it noted,

The old gentleman is guarding his plans with scrupulous caution and secrecy, so there is no telling what day the startled populace may wake up to find him doing fancy designs in the blue ether and teasing the express trains with a three-mile-per-minute spurt. Up to the present time he has not made any extensive flights. One time he slid down a mountain with his wings, but admits that it may not have been a final test.

The professor has a creative mind and when the harbor or overhead transportation questions are not occupying his time, he may be found at work drawing designs of his one-man ship, or collecting funds for preliminary work . . . There is hardly a merchant or business man of the city who has not listened to the gigantic schemes of the professor.

Shaw claimed he tried to get a patent in Paris, “but there were spies in the office who very nearly got away with the whole affair,” so he chose to make and then destroy his models, though he did show the Times drawings that were reprinted for the article. These showed that “the flyer inserts himself into a round jacket and grasps the ribs of two concave wings at the sides,” while the feet were placed into stirrups. Once the pilot got into a run and flapped the wings a couple of times with the wind lifting from under the silk covers, “all the soarer has to do is gyrate,” much as a South American condor or, for local study, the California buzzard would.

Shaw informed the paper that “the machine will carry a man and thirty-five pounds of lunch for a long flight” and a practical and salable device was one “that would carry its owner across the United States or ocean, if called upon to do so.” He claimed that he made but one flight, taking place in 1897 or 1898 in the Sierra Nevada range and he “had the advantage of a hill, and made something over the three miles per sixty seconds.

In the meantime, he insisted he had a corporation at work on his flying apparatus, telling the Times,

We are erecting an $800,000 manufactory at Ballona [about where his artificial harbor was to be built]. I have orders right here in town for 10,000 pairs of wings, at $500 each . . . Dr. K.D. Wise ordered the first one. I loaned the owners at Ballona $80,000 to keep them quiet. After the factory is complete we will grind out the wings very rapidly and they will be found in every store, where the children, as well as older people, can go and buy them.

Shaw added that the directors of his firm were the same as for the People’s Ocean firm, to which he sold a half-interest in the patent for $1,000,000. He named the directors, some of them mentioned in part six of this post, and stated that he was a vice-president (third as noted above) and general manager and further remarked, “I have already let the contract for the manufactory and before a year our citizens will be flying.” This, of course, did not happen, though the Wright Brothers did get their aircraft off the ground at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, some two years later.

Yet, the paper commented, “the officers of the corporation seemed to be absent-minded when the matter was brought to their attention,” and “a number of them had entirely forgotten that they had been elected.” They all recalled Shaw discussing the idea with them, “but could not recollect investing very heavily.” The piece ended with the statement (tongue perhaps planted firmly in cheek) that “the professor has certainly made great financial strides since he lived in a hollow tree” as “he has other incorporations on the way, and capitalists falling to get in on the two mentioned above will be served later.”

In the last baker’s dozen of years of Shaw’s life, he appeared very infrequently in the pages of the press, with perhaps his last letter to the editor, concerning how to keep hay dry during rains, published in May 1904. It was a decade later that the Los Angeles Tribune of 22 November 1914 reported,

Despite the fact that he broke his left leg three times trying to fly with a pair of canvas wings, Frederick M. Shaw, eighty-seven years old, will not give up the idea of trying to aviate. But yesterday when walking he fell at First street and Broadway and broke his left leg for the fourth time. [After doctors told him he’d never walk again without crutches] . . .

“I do not mind being injured while trying to fly,” said the aged inventor, “but I don’t like to get hurt while walking along the street. When my leg gets well I may make another attempt to attain flight with my wings arrangement.”

The paper continued that Shaw drew notice some two decades prior when, at a lot on Sixth Street near Central Avenue, he made his first attempt at flight, resulting in his first broken leg, and it added that “undaunted, Shaw made numerous other attempts to aviate” and “he fell many times” including those two other efforts ending in injury. The article concluded with the observation that the inventor’s plans for his wings fell out of his pocket during his last fall.

The Times, in its coverage of the incident, recorded that Shaw slipped on a banana peel and that he bemoaned, “it’s the irony of fate. I have devoted nearly all my life to my invention, which when perfected would in reality permit men to fly in the clouds with the safety of birds and here I am on a hospital cot as the result of a simple accident on the ground.” Calling him “one of the city’s well-known eccentric characters,” the paper remarked that he took out his plans for the wings and “exhibited it with pride, declaring if he only had more time and a little money, he could perfect it.”

In relating the attempt in the mid-Nineties to fly, the Times noted that he made his effort from the upper floor of a two-story building “and broke a number of bones” while “upon three different occasions he attempted to prove to the world that he had mastered the air problem,” and failed each time. The paper and the Tribune stated that he established the Stein Transit Company for the project, with the Times saying he expended several thousands of dollars on it, before it was ended. Shaw cried when doctors told him he was unlikely to walk again and the paper cited two verses written on his plans:

Oh, that like doves I had two wings

The ancient bard of Israel sings;

That I would fly and be at last

Secure from foes that have oppressed.

And many are the seers of old

Who have of angels’ pinions told

And now the good at last shall rise

To join their host above the skies.

The injured man was taken from a receiving facility to the Los Angeles County Hospital, but, on 7 December, briefly reported the Los Angeles Express, Shaw succumbed to his injuries. The following day’s editions of the Times and Tribune were equally brief in their remarks and no obituaries could be located, while four days later, a death notice listed the cause of death as “shock.” As there were no funeral services listed either, he may have been destitute and subject to burial in the county cemetery, located adjacent to Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights.

Shaw was essentially forgotten for some nine decades until a Cal Poly Pomona student found a reference to him in a class taught by Professor Ralph Shaffer, who died two years ago. Shaffer, fascinated by the Laurel Canyon eccentric (canyon communities do tend to have their fair share of these) and also a frequent contributor of essays to our local press, wrote some news articles about him and then self-published “Crazy Shaw”: Southern California’s Forgotten Dreamer, of which a very small number were produced.

Whatever was thought about Shaw during his forty-odd years in Los Angeles, he clearly was a highly-intelligent person, with a wide range of interests and no shortage of ideas, however far-fetched, that, in some ways, had kernels of some practicality and foresight in them. He certainly was colorful and entertaining, whether he was insane or, as Shaffer suggested, the first counterculture resident of Laurel Canyon.