Edith Ogilby Berg was the first American woman passenger on a controlled airplane flight, flown by Wilbur Wright in September 1908 and is considered a key influence in the hobble skirt as a fashion trend. For some years she was married to Hart O. Berg, who represented the Wright Brothers' business interests in Europe.
Edith Ogilby was born in California. She was a daughter of actress Louise Paullin and Robert Edwin Ogilby, who had immigrated from Britain or Ireland to California in the Gold Rush of 1849, then became a professor of drawing at the University of California-Berkeley. [2] [3] Her grandfather was Irish-born British military officer Sir David Ogilby.
Edith married Charles Bryant Titcomb in 1887 at age 19. [4] They had a daughter, Grace Titcomb. The couple divorced in 1889.
She became an actress under the stage name Edith Paullin, adopting her mother's maiden name. She appeared in some of the same productions as her second husband, the actor and producer Hubert Druce. While married to Hubert, Edith went by Edith Alice Druce until they divorced in January 1905. [5]
Edith married Hart O. Berg in 1906 and thus met the Wright brothers. Wilbur Wright described her as “a jolly woman and very intelligent”, and his sister Katharine said Edith was "about the best dressed woman I ever saw”. [6] [7]
She saw Wilbur demonstrate the Wright Flyer airplane at Le Mans, France, and asked Wilbur for a ride in it. He agreed, and on 7 October 1908 Berg rode as his passenger in a two-minute flight at nearby Auvours, France, thus becoming the first American woman to fly in a fixed-wing aircraft. [8]
On the aircraft, she tied a rope around her skirt at her ankles to keep it from blowing in the wind during the flight. A French fashion designer watching the flight noticed her walk away from the aircraft with her skirt still tied. This image is said to have influenced the subsequent hobble skirt fashion of the early 20th century. [9]
Edith had another family connection to aviation. In 1905, her daughter Grace had married Paris lawyer Paul Foy. Foy conducted the first prosecution for “furious driving in the air” in October 1909, following the crash of a Blériot monoplane into a crowd of spectators, several of whom were injured, during a display at Port-Aviation in Viry-Chatillon. [10]
Edith and Hart Berg divorced in 1922. She then used the name Edith Ogilby-Druce. She died in August 1949 in San Francisco. [11]
The Wright brothers, Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright, were American aviation pioneers generally credited with inventing, building, and flying the world's first successful motor-operated airplane. They made the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft with the Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903, four miles south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, at what is now known as Kill Devil Hills. The brothers were also the first to invent aircraft controls that made fixed-wing powered flight possible.
This is a list of aviation-related events from 1908:
This is a list of aviation-related events from 1904:
A hobble skirt was a skirt with a narrow enough hem to significantly impede the wearer's stride. It was called a "hobble skirt" because it seemed to hobble any woman as she walked. Hobble skirts were a short-lived fashion trend that peaked between 1908 and 1914.
Debbi Fields is the founder and spokesperson of Mrs. Fields Bakeries. She has written several cookbooks and makes cookies. A resident of Memphis, Tennessee for over 16 years since she remarried in 1997, she moved to Nashville in 2014. Her late husband, Michael Rose, was the former CEO/Chairman of Holiday Corp. and Harrah's Entertainment, Inc. He died of cancer on April 2, 2017, at the age of 75.
Katharine Wright Haskell was the younger sister of aviation pioneers Wilbur and Orville Wright. She worked closely with her brothers, managing their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, when they were away; acting as their right-hand woman and general factotum in Europe; assisting with their voluminous correspondence and business affairs; and providing a sounding board for their far-ranging ideas. She pursued a professional career as a high school teacher in Dayton, at a time when few middle-class American women worked outside the home, and went on to become an international celebrity in her own right. A significant figure in the early-twentieth-century women's movement, she worked actively on behalf of woman suffrage in Ohio and served as the third female trustee of Oberlin College.
Astrid Allwyn was an American stage and film actress.
Willa Beatrice Brown was an American aviator, lobbyist, teacher, and civil rights activist. She was the first African American woman to earn a pilot's license in the United States, the first African American woman to run for the United States Congress, first African American officer in the Civil Air Patrol, and first woman in the U.S. to have both a pilot's license and an aircraft mechanic's license.
Ruth Martin Jefford was an air taxi pilot in the U.S. state of Alaska and the first woman licensed to be a flight instructor out of Merrill Field. Jefford was a violinist who became a co-founder of the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra. During World War II, she entertained at the United Service Organizations in Alaska and transported medical supplies for the Red Cross Motor Corp. She was the first woman in Alaska to receive the Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award. She was inducted into the Alaska Women's Hall of Fame in 2009.
Agnes Mary Claypole Moody was an American zoologist and professor of natural science.
Leda Richberg-Hornsby was an American pilot and suffragist. She was the first female graduate of the Wright Flying School in Dayton, Ohio, and the eighth woman in the United States to receive a pilot's license.
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Mr. Nielsen announces that there is no question to be raised against his prognostication that in a few years aeroplane parties will be common. He states that by the time of the Pacific-Panama exposition in San Francisco, many of the now motor enthusiasts will fly to San Francisco in their ships of the air. He believes that the exposition authorities will provide landing places for their aerial guests.
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Louise Paullin, sometimes seen as Louisa Paullin, was an American stage actress.
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Hart Ostheimer Berg (1865–1941) was an American-born engineer and businessman. Celebrated for his transatlantic promotion of innovative industrial products in the early twentieth century, he is best known for having represented the Wright Brothers’ aviation interests in Europe.
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Hubert Druce was an English actor and producer involved with English and American theater for over forty years.