Scope and Content Note
The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics was formed by the merger in 1963 of the Institute of the Aerospace Sciences and the American Rocket Society. The material contained in this collection comes from the aeronautical archives of the former Institute of the Aerospace Sciences. The archives was first formerly organized in 1939 and was discontinued in 1962, by which time it contained one of the most extensive files of aeronautical material in the world. When it was discontinued, the Smithsonian Institution, the Connecticut Historical Society, and the Library of Congress received various segments of the collection. The collection is organized in six series: Biographical Files , Aircraft Company Files , Miscellany , Scrapbooks , Material Removed from Scrapbooks after Microfilming , and Oversize .
The material given by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics does not contain records of the institute itself. It represents only aeronautical subject files collected between the years 1939 and 1962. These information files are supplemented by scrapbooks and a small miscellaneous group of papers. The files run the gamut of aeronautical history from the Montgolfiers and the first balloon flight to the development of the modern air force. The collection contains two types of information files, biographical and corporate.
The Biographical Files consist of newspaper clippings, articles, biographical questionnaires, printed matter, and occasional primary material. Among the prominent files are those for Henry Harley Arnold, Thomas S. Baldwin, Louis Blériot, Richard Evelyn Byrd, Clarence D. Chamberlain, Octave Chanute, Glenn Hammond Curtiss, Alexander P. De Seversky, James Harold Doolittle, Amelia Earhart, C. G. Grey, Frank Hawks, Henry Allen Hazen, William S. Henson, Maurice Holland, Howard Hughes (1905-1976), John Jeffries, Charles Edward Kingsford-Smith, Alexander Klemin, Roy Knabenshue, S. P. Langley, Charles A. Lindbergh, T. S. C. Lowe, Johnny Mack, Glenn L. Martin, James V. Martin, William Mitchell, Wiley Post, Eddie Rickenbacker, Alberto Santos-Dumont, T. O. Selfridge, Igor Ivan Sikorsky, A. Leo Stevens, J. T. Trippe, Edward Pearson Warner, Orville Wright, and Wilbur Wright.
Items of unusual interest in the Biographical Files include a reproduction of a Thomas Jefferson letter of 1822 concerning the future prospects of air flight in the United States; letters by Edmond Charles Genet dated January 15, 1826, and May 7, 1827; a manuscript scrap by Walt Whitman concerning aviation written in his hand about 1850; a letter from Victor Hugo sent out of Paris by balloon during the siege of the Paris Commune in 1870; a letter by Theodore Roosevelt to Walter Wellman dated December 9, 1904, concerning a possible flight to the North Pole; a 1917 letter about ballooning from Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt to Roy Knabenshue; and the completed application form by Charles Lindbergh for the $25,000 Orteig Prize awarded to the first person to fly nonstop from New York to Paris.
The records include material donated to the institute's archives by private collectors. Five individual donors account for a majority of the source material in this collection. At least part of the collections of Bella Clara Landauer, T. S. C. Lowe, Hart O. Berg, Charles A. Lindbergh, and Lester D. Gardner are interfiled in the Biographical Files . In most cases it is impossible to assign individual items to specific donations.
An especially interesting file is that of T. S. C. Lowe, the chief aeronaut of the Army of the Potomac, containing his personal papers, 1859-1943, covering a variety of Civil War and late nineteenth-century ballooning. The file contains correspondence with such Civil War figures as Secretary of War Edwin McMasters Stanton, General George Gordon Meade, and the first secretary of the Smithsonian, Joseph Henry. There is a small file of Charles A. Lindbergh papers concerned mainly with the manuscript "Flying Around the North Atlantic" written by his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and published in the National Geographic Magazine in 1934. There is also a file of correspondence between Charles A. Lindbergh and the National Geographic Society for the years 1934-1935. Bella Clara Landauer's contributions to the aeronautical archives are interspersed throughout the Biographical Files and Scrapbooks series. She donated material on such aeronautical figures as Octave Chanute, William S. Henson, Auguste Piccard, and John Stringfellow. The Hart O. Berg collection consists of scrapbooks of newspaper clippings relating to the Wright brothers.
The last major contributor to the archives was Lester D. Gardner. His direct contribution of personal scrapbooks and a collection of aeronautical Christmas cards is small, but Gardner's indirect contributions as executive secretary of the institute form the backbone of the collection. He organized, supervised, and helped arrange the archives, and his organization of the material pervades the entire collection.
The Aircraft Company Files are composed almost entirely of printed matter and newspaper clippings with very little primary documentation. The Scrapbook series includes a variety of aeronautical material. There is a unique collection of aeronautical Christmas cards arranged chronologically from the 1920s to the 1940s. Container 177 has two scrapbooks that contain clippings from the eighteenth century, and a scrapbook labeled "Rare aeronautical manuscript material" in Container OV 75 has clippings and broadsides dating to the year 1804.