Biographical Sketches

DANIEL
HARRY GUGGENHEIM
GUGGENHEIM

Born: July 9,1856
August 23, 1890    In: Philadelphia, PA
West End, NJ
Died: September, 28, 1930
January 22, 1971    In: Port Washington, NY
Sands Point, LI, NY

A father-son team who, with their philantrophies and personal involvement, affected the course of aviation history to an immeasureable extent. Although the elder, Daniel Guggenheim, died without ever having flown, even as a passenger, his legacy remains active today. Between 1925 and 1930, he put more than $3.3 million (in 1930s dollars!) into a series of aviation-related initiatives which led to the development of more reliable aircraft engines and instruments, and, perhaps most important, public acceptance of aviation as a safe and fast method of transportation. But Guggenheim was in his 70s in these experimental years, and was happy to leave the actual flying to younger people.

Harry Guggenheim, on the other hand, saw service in The Great War as a naval aviator in Europe, and became a staunch advocate of commercial air travel. He conviced his father, wealthy from the family’s mining and smelting business, into donating $500,000 to establish a school of aeronautical engineering at New York University, the first of eight such schools they would ultimately endow.

Besides his annual Guggenheim Medal awards for great achievement in aviation, the elder Guggenheim also set up a fund to promote aviation, including research. One of its more important projects was a town-marking campaign that encouraged communities to paint their names on the roofs of large buildings so that pilots who became lost would be able to establish a landmark. A simple idea, suggested to them by Charles Lindbergh, that had a profound impact on aviation safety, saw 8,000 towns so identified by 1930.

Most novel for the time, and producing long-term effects, Daniel in 1927 announced his Safe Aircraft Competition that led to the development of airplanes that could fly at low speeds without stalling, the main cause of crashes then. Two years after that, he established a flight laboratory at Mitchel Field NY to develop instruments that would enable pilots to fly even when it was too foggy for them to see the ground.

Together the Guggenheims established a prototype airline between San Francisco and Los Angeles to show that air travel was safe, fast, and reliable. Although this idea had been tried in 1922 for military needs, it never caught on with the general public, and air travel as such required passengers to share space with mails and cargo. The Guggenheim made money available for aircraft and equipment, and to establish a weather service and radio communications network. Only two operators saw any future in this new idea -- Varney Air Lines and Western Air Express -- and using new Fokker tri-motors, WAE inaugurated scheduled service in May 1928, offering passengers a three-hour flight over a 13-hour train trip. Rather than the experiment ending, it became the matrix of operations for WAE, as well as others to follow. Additionally, the Aviation Weather Service and in-flight communications were born with this plan.

Grants and research centers were established in other colleges -- typical was the Harvard-Guggenheim Center for Aviation Health and Safety -- and the pair even sponsored Lindbergh on a 48-state tour to promote aviation. After his father’s death, Harry, who co-founded Newsday with his wife in 1940, continued aviation-related philanthropies with sponsorship of rocketry pioneer, Robert Goddard.

Harry Guggenheim enshrined in National Aviation Hall of Fame 1971. (Peter Bergen)

Denotes an individual known to have soloed an aircraft prior to December 16, 1917, whether they were members of the "Early Birds of Aviation" Organization or not.