Emil Bruechig

NOTES

Transcriber's Notes

By Emil Bruechig

EMIL BRUECHIG
522 FIFTH AVENUE
NEW YORK CITY, N. Y.
CABLE ADDRESS: “BRUECHIG,” N. Y.

COPYRIGHT 1936
BY
EMIL BRUECHIG

The history of the flying machine reaches back as far as the earliest of man’s written records of his thoughts and ambitions. And one can only surmise how long ago it must have been, in the dim unchronicled past, when the idea of human flight first suggested itself to our ancestors.

¶ The ancient mythology of the Greeks reveals an interest in this problem. The philosophers who lived when Rome was ruler of the world, and the alchemists of the middle ages have left time-stained parchments of their thoughts and theories about artificial flight.

¶ And even today, after centuries of trial and error have brought an intangible dream to a streamlined actuality, the glamour and marvel of aviation still grips the minds of men. Hardly any device which humanity has fashioned has taken so lengthy a time to accomplish and, after being achieved, has been able to hold its place in the sun—in war and in peace.

¶ For it was war that brought the rapid development of the airplane into a machine that is serving man so capably as a peace-time vehicle. Bringing serum to the critically ill; winging food to flooded and snow-bound areas; transporting people over thousands of miles in a single day; and speeding up the wheels of commerce with its mail carriers; these are but a few of the almost magical feats which aviation has made possible.

¶ And, better than volumes of words could describe, one will find this vast panorama of man’s struggle for mastery over the air pictured in glowing colors and realistic scenes on the hundreds of air mail stamps which have been issued by almost all countries of the world.

¶ There is a tale of danger and daring behind each square of tinted paper, a pulse-quickening story of crossing fever-ridden jungles, battling treacherous, snow-clad mountain peaks, and risking the mocking death of desert wastes.

¶ It takes no great stretch of the imagination to visualize the magnitude and grace of the Zeppelins as pictured on the German air mail stamps. From afar, one seems to hear the deep-throated roar of the great engines and the whistle of the wind as it strums along the wires. The great “Graf,” air-traveler supreme, is flying before your eyes!

¶ One needs no trip to the Mediterranean to see the blue of its waters and the gold of its sun. The Grecian issue with an indescribable delicacy of line and color suffices. The ruins of the Acropolis, perched on their hilly site, before a background of cloud-studded skies, seem but a step away.

¶ But to single out stamps here and there does not do full justice to this theme—the myriad perfection of air mail stamps as a pictorial record of a great triumph must be viewed in a more methodical manner, and more broadly, as a grand mural of many events.

¶ Beginning with the fabulous flight of Daedalus and his son Icarus, on wings made of wax and feathers, we can follow the story of aviation on air mail stamps. We see the Roman philosopher, Virgil, on an Italian adhesive, gazing at a gliding eagle and remarking prophetically, “I assign limits neither to the extent nor the duration of the empire.”

¶ Even Leonardo Da Vinci, while creating paintings of undying fame, must have spent many an hour musing on the possibilities of flight by artificial means. His ideas were so detailed that he drew a plan of a glider which, although never constructed in wood and fabric, embodies several fundamental features of aero-dynamics.

¶ The progress of aviation was rutted in this theoretical stage, however, for hundreds of years. Many problems, some of them still unthought of, had to be overcome before controlled flight was a reality.

¶ Ballooning, of course, had developed steadily after the epochal success of the Montgolfier brothers in 1783. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Alberto Santos-Dumont began experimenting with dirigibles. His early attempts were made with non-rigid balloons, and we can see one of this Brazilian’s ships circling the Eiffel Tower of Paris, on a stamp issued by his native land.

¶ The event pictured took place on October 19, 1901, before a group of officials of the French Aero Club who were there to award a prize of 100,000 francs if Santos-Dumont could successfully fly from the Aero Club Park to the Eiffel Tower and return. Several previous attempts had resulted in failure, but this day the craft made the first lap of the journey without mishap.

¶ At a fairly high altitude the balloon rounded the tower at its very tip, but as soon as the nose pointed homeward, a strong wind struck it, slowing the motor to such an extent that it almost stopped. For the moment Santos-Dumont was between the devil and the deep blue sea. If he loosened his control from the steering lever to adjust the carburetor, the balloon might swing wild. But the fates were kind that day—his ship sailed on as he tinkered with the spark and brought his sputtering motor back to a healthy roar.

¶ On he sailed, over the Bois, then over the throngs at the Auteuil race-track while precious minutes were ticking on. He had to complete the voyage in a half hour and only a few moments remained of this allotted time.

¶ The dirigible wobbled, it swung up and then down, the engine wheezed and coughed—but Santos-Dumont kept his eyes fixed on the goal. The cheers of the crowd rose into the air and then died to a whisper as nerves became rigid with suspense. It wasn’t a question whether he would make it, now, but whether he would do it on time. For the minutes were flying faster than the ship—at last he passed over Longchamps, the Seine was crossed, and finally Santos-Dumont sailed by over the heads of the French Aero Club officials. The line had been crossed—and the flight completed in twenty-nine minutes and thirty seconds!

¶ Another countryman of this successful aeronaut was Augusto Severo who built a much larger balloon than had ever been attempted up to that time. “The Pax” which has been illustrated on an air stamp crashed, however, dashing Severo and his mechanic to a horrible death. The unfortunate airman struck the earth with such terrific force that the bones of his feet were forced through the soles of his boots.

¶ To Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, though, goes the greatest honors for bringing this type of aircraft to a really practical development. After a hectic, military life during which he served the Union cause in the Civil War under the immortal Lincoln, he retired to dream about the vision that had lived with him since youth. To build rigid balloons, to put a skeleton of metal under a hood of fabric was his contribution to this science.

¶ Count Zeppelin was 61 years of age when his first great airliner was finished, a ship over 400 feet long and 38 feet in diameter. This was by far the largest dirigible ever built up to that time, and thousands of people flocked to witness its first flight in July, 1899. Journalists, peasants, scientists, men and women of all ages and interests came to see this huge sausage-shaped balloon navigate through space.

¶ The morning of that epochal day was clear and bright, as bright as the feverish glint in Zeppelin’s eyes, as, with poorly-concealed excitement, he tested ropes and wires, and examined the hundred-and-one vital parts of the L. Z. 1. The great crowds that surged about the lake stood in hushed awe as he came out of the hangar after the inspection was completed, and reverently bowed his head in silent prayer. A few moments later, the roar of two powerful motors went echoing over the waters of Lake Constance, and slowly the dirigible glided from the cavernous depths of its hangar. And then, with a serene indifference, the L. Z. 1 floated upward, higher, higher into the full glare of the sun.

¶ While wave after wave of full-throated cheers announced to the world a triumphant achievement, the airship traveled three and a half miles. Seventeen minutes later, it descended safely at Immenstadt.

¶ The air mail stamps existing today bear witness to the importance of this accomplishment. Dozens of them picture the great Zeppelins from their early beginnings to their present state of perfection. Tableaus depicting them over the polar regions, and topping the crags of mountain ranges, and even in the process of construction form a visual history of the balloon.

¶ And now the Wright brothers come to the fore! After years of patient experimenting, these humble bicycle builders from Dayton, Ohio, launched a ’plane powered with a gasoline engine upon a startled world. On the bleak sands of Kitty Hawk, Orville and Wilbur Wright had seen their efforts crowned with success. Aviation had taken its biggest step forward.

¶ The Wright ’plane’s successful performance, which is shown on a two-cent U. S. stamp of 1928, gave new impetus to this branch of aeronautics.

¶ And Santos-Dumont, apparently forsaking the lighter-than-air vessels that had occupied his earlier years, followed the trail blazed by these two Americans. In 1906 he perfected a biplane glider which rose from water and flew. This flight which was staged in Paris, the scene of most of the Brazilian’s experiments, was the first official European ascension of a heavier-than-air craft.

¶ Flying, by this time, had become a more practical affair. With the elemental principles understood and conquered, minor improvements were developed as a result of ever-widening experience. In the summer of 1909, Bleriot crossed the English Channel in a frail monoplane and received an ovation almost as great as that accorded Lindbergh for his daring feat.

¶ But before Lindbergh could take a ’plane from New York to Paris in one triumphant jump, years had to pass, years of war that spread havoc and desolation throughout the world. But from the embers of that conflagration one thing, at least, emerged with greater glory. While guns and ammunition were dumped in the sea, and warships scrapped, the airplane rose in the eyes of the world to a new height of importance.

¶ For the war had wrought a great change in this device—no longer were ’planes but the playthings of a few, but servants that could serve a world!

¶ Today we can see on the air mail stamps of Spain, of Brazil, and the African Congo, portraits of the early craft—and by turning a few leaves of the album, can view the wartime “devils of the air”—the D. H. 4’s, the Curtiss “Jennies,” and the deadly Fokkers.

¶ Soon after the great conflict had ended, the hundreds of daring airmen who found themselves footloose, began to gamble their lives against a new element. Where formerly they had defied machine-gun bullets, they now pitted their skill against the hazards of sea and jungle.

¶ The London “Daily Mail” had offered a handsome prize of ten thousand pounds for the first successful dash across the Atlantic Ocean. Having this as a powerful incentive, two intrepid flyers, Major Harry G. Hawker and Commander K. Mackenzie Grieve, were striving to be the first to span this dangerous trail with a non-stop flight.

¶ On the morning of Sunday, May 18, 1919, while the populace of Newfoundland’s capital were sunk in slumber, these two men trundled forth their frail Sopwith biplane and launched it over the turbulent sea, a desert of water that would menace them for thousands of miles. According to available records, they soon had the ill fortune to be caught in a series of storms. In Hawker’s own story of the flight, he states that after these will-o-the-wisp squalls had been overcome, the cooling system began to clog. In a few moments, the temperature of the water spurted to the boiling point.

¶ By diving quickly several times, Hawker managed to free the flow momentarily, but this expedient soon proved useless as the trouble became more acute. With its cooling agency crippled, the engine balked. Hawker declared that when the motor had gone dead, they suffered some nerve-racking seconds as the sea came toward them at a smashing speed.

¶ But Grieve climbed to the forward part of the ship, near the gasoline tank, and furiously worked to bring life back to the stilled engine. Despite Hawker’s best efforts to check the fall, they were dropping steadily and, according to his statement, were but twenty feet above the sea when the cylinders spluttered. Only ten feet when the motor took up its full load again.

¶ Knowing that their only hope was to sight a vessel, they searched frantically for one through the gathering dusk. At last when things seemed rather bleak, a Danish freighter, the “Mary,” was espied by the anxious airmen and after twelve hundred arduous miles of flying, they landed to be rescued by this good Samaritan of the sea.

¶ Soon after, another team of aviators, Alcock and Brown, took off from the same soil, and sixteen hours from Newfoundland, they were circling over Clifden, on the west coast of Ireland. Many a son of Erin’s Sabbath peace was rudely shattered as this great Vickers-Vimy bomber came droning out of the sky to bury its nose deep in an Irish bog. The “Daily Mail” prize of ten thousand pounds was theirs, and an appropriate trophy, commemorating this feat, was also presented to Alcock and Brown.

¶ Others still followed the path of the North Atlantic, even though the incentive of the prize money had been removed. Admiral Sir Mark Kerr, Captain Boyd, Chamberlain and Levine, and De Pinedo were but a few of those who followed in the wake of the triumphant Alcock.

¶ All these pioneering flights, with their attendant narratives of death and danger, are recorded on the air mail stamps of Newfoundland. The ’planes they used, and the routes the fliers followed are pictured for all time on these mute bits of postal paper.

¶ After Lindbergh had made his Atlantic voyage, he hopped off on his famous Pan-American tour. And as he flew from country to country, he left behind a trail of philatelic mementos of this venture. Costa Rica, Panama, and Cuba, to mention but a few countries, issued special stamps to honor his visits.

¶ Exploration, too, has been immeasurably aided by the airplane and one case in point is the Amundsen-Ellsworth expedition of 1925, a polar trip which has been chronicled by a Norwegian set of air mail stamps.

¶ Their journey started on the afternoon of May 21, 1925, when two Dornier-Wal flying-boats rose from the waters of Kings Bay, Spitzbergen, and headed for the North Pole. With motors roaring in unison, the flight got under way auspiciously.

¶ After traversing six hundred miles, the navigators calculated that their position should be directly above the North Pole, but a strong wind had been blowing, which had driven them unawares over a hundred miles off their course.

¶ In landing their ships, however, through the jagged fissures of open ice, both ’planes were damaged. Amundsen, Ellsworth and the crew realized that their only hope of salvation lay in repairing at least one of the ships. A couple of weeks passed before this task was accomplished, and only completed in that length of time through almost superhuman endeavor.

¶ To effect a take-off, a smooth plateau of ice had to be found and small scouting parties discovered a large floe for this purpose, but it was a half mile from their ’plane. And between that broad field of ice and the Dornier-Wal, there rose a high ridge, and a bit further on, a deep chasm gouged across the trail.

¶ But to this handful of men, necessity was a taskmaster that bade them conquer all the hazards that an angry Arctic hurled against them. With nothing but primitive tools, Amundsen’s party hacked a passage through the fifteen-foot thickness of the ice-ridge, a passage wide enough to accommodate the great wing-span of their craft.

¶ At last, all perils were overcome and the crew piled into the ship, dumping every unnecessary article from the ’plane to lighten the load. The motors were started. With a surge the ship moved forward—it bumped—it swayed—it traveled 300 meters—then 400—and at last it tore itself from the ice and flew!

¶ That evening the adventurers were picked up by a cruising steamer and returned safely to their homeland—leaving another Arctic adventure behind them.

¶ And so we can see, in a never-ending panorama, the story of flight on air mail stamps. Twenty-eight hundred stamps have been issued, approximately, and one by one they add color and zest to this adventurous story.

¶ The round-the-world trampings of the “Graf” Zeppelin, the never-ending stream of long-distance flights, the break-neck air races at Cleveland, the wanderings of the DO-X, and the gigantic air armada of Balbo—all are chronicled on air mail stamps. And even while they portray the struggles of the past, they also prophesy still greater triumphs for the future.

¶ The thousands of air mail collectors, drawn from all walks of life including Emperors, Presidents, and leaders of industry, bear witness to the fascination of this hobby. Besides being an interesting avocation, however, the collecting of mint air mail stamps excels most gilt-edged securities when considered from a purely investment point of view.

¶ This might seem to be a rash statement, but the history of the past few years has irrefutably proven it to be true. While statistics are usually dry-as-dust things, let us examine a few. They will, in this case, prove as exciting to the collector as his air stamps themselves.

¶ First, consider the age-old economic law of supply and demand. In the case at hand, we find the demand for stamps so deep-seated and secure that it literally stretches from the cradle to the grave. From the business transacted by government agencies and the multitude of dealers in philatelic merchandise, authorities have estimated that five out of every hundred people, both here and abroad, are stamp collectors. Such a computation means, that in the United States alone, well over 5,000,000 people pursue this hobby.

¶ There are scores of philatelic publications, both weekly and monthly, which boast appreciable circulations paid for by popular subscription. By the “movie” newsreels publicizing new stamp issues, and metropolitan newspapers featuring a regular column on this subject, one can easily realize that this vast network for the dissemination of stamp information must reach a tremendous audience. And this Gargantuan following was not built in a day, a year, or a decade. No, for well over a half-century has gone into its making.

¶ This hobby was almost as firmly established before the dawn of the gas-lit nineties as it is today. Its vast army of adherents prove that stamp collecting is no fad, no fleeting joy-of-the-moment, but that it can be rightfully called the universal hobby.

¶ Placed squarely against the problem of demand is the question of supply. It is, of course, simple economics to understand that when the demand for something is greater than the supply, the value rises accordingly. And the wider the difference between these two poles, the greater will be the appreciation in value.

¶ Unused air mail stamps fit such a situation admirably. For these special adhesives are seldom printed in large quantities. Because their use is limited, in the majority of cases, to prepaying matter carried by airplane, issues of stamps in lots of less than 100,000 copies are the rule, rather than the exception. Quite frequently, the smaller governments will confine a special issue to five or ten thousands copies—a fact which means that on this broad globe of ours only a handful of people can ever hope to own such a specimen, regardless of their wealth or position in life. And this number of possible possessors is materially lessened because of the fact that most specialists build their collections with blocks of four stamps of each issue as well as single copies.

¶ Looking back only three short years ago at the prices which air mail stamps commanded during the spring of 1933, the reader will quickly realize the soundness of the foregoing remarks. Ascribe it to what you will: their popularity, their intriguing history, or their limited supply—one principal fact will stand out. The simple fact that air mail stamps have, as a whole since this time, doubled in value, with many instances of issues which trebled and quadrupled their former price.

¶ For the purpose of illustration, we can choose a few air mail adhesives issued by our own government for no one could question the integrity behind the postal paper of the United States. The first triumvirate of values brought out in 1918 was in six, sixteen, and twenty-four cent denominations. During April of 1933, the market price for this set was $2.50. Today, it is offered at $4.00.

¶ The 1923 set, however, shows a much greater appreciation in value when percentage of increase is considered. On the date mentioned above, this issue sold for $1.25, and today commands at least $3.00 for fine specimens. And the famous “Graf Zeppelin” issue has soared from $10.00 in 1933 to a present-day figure which varies from $35.00 to $40.00 per set, depending upon condition.

¶ And to bring the reader still another amazing instance, we can refer to the special stamp printed in October, 1933, in commemoration of the Century of Progress flight made by the Graf Zeppelin. Just about two and a half years have passed since this fifty cent adhesive left the printing presses at the Bureau of Engraving. Today, copies of it are bringing $3.00, with many dealers unable to supply them at that price because of their scarcity and unabated demand.

¶ We could, without question, continue this parade of statistics through the entire list of air stamps issued by all countries of the world, but lack the space to make such a lengthy comparison. If, however, any reader has any lingering doubts, we invite him to make a complete check-up. To his amazement, we can foretell, he will find that our statements are conservative indeed.

¶ Of course, the racketeer, the bucket-shop, and the confidence-man, to mention but a few, are types of vicious parasites that fasten themselves on legitimate business, and prey on the unwary, doing as much harm to the honest merchant as to the swindled purchaser. And, we must admit, that the philatelic business is no exception to this rule.

¶ It is regrettable that while people know they cannot buy diamonds in a five-and-ten cent store, yet they will, time and again, be persuaded to buy philatelic merchandise from doubtful sources at “bargain” prices. A forgery is no bargain at any price as many a collector has learned to his embarrassment and dismay, when a counterfeit specimen is discovered in his album. And, strange as it may seem, these tricksters of the trade do not confine themselves to counterfeiting the rarities alone, but lend their shady talents to duplicating the low-priced issues also.

¶ When dealing with errors, especially, one must exercise care and judgment before purchasing. While genuine errors do make a collection distinctive and complete, yet they should only be acquired after an acknowledged specialist has guaranteed their authenticity.

¶ The House of Emil Bruechig can rightfully offer such a guarantee. Having served collectors in all parts of the globe for many years, and always maintaining a complete stock of air mail stamps, including many rarities and errors, we stand squarely behind every item we sell. As our old friends know, and our new friends will discover, their air mail stamps are always genuine and of superior quality, when they bear the insignia of:

BRUECHIG
The Guarantee of Satisfaction