There was a time when Harris & Ewing was the nation’s largest photo agency.
Based on F Street in downtown Washington, D.C. (the agency’s main studio
building still stands and is on the National Register of Historic Places), the
agency expanded into multiple studios, had up to 120 employees and used a
legion of freelance photographers. Many of those photographers turned their
lenses on the airplanes and pilots who passed through the nation’s capital,
providing a unique snapshot of the golden age of aviation.
George W. Harris was born in Wales, emigrated to the United States in 1881 and
had worked in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Arkansas before finding work as a
photographer in San Francisco. There he met Martha Ewing, who had her own
studio. The two became partners. Supposedly President Theodore Roosevelt
himself talked Harris into relocating to Washington, which he did in 1905. He
became the White House photographer and oversaw the steadily increasing
business of Harris & Ewing. Harris bought Ewing out in 1915 and he sold the
business 30 years later. Before he died in 1964, Harris donated some 70,000 of
the agency’s photographs to the Library of Congress.
Many of those images depict the aviation comings and goings in Washington.
They include some famous pilots—Amelia Earhart
and Charles
Lindbergh—as
well as politicians, socialites and more obscure figures whose names are lost
to history, often photographed standing somewhat stiffly in front of an
airplane. The menagerie of aircraft captured by the agency’s photographers run
the gamut from navy flying boats to the tiny Verville-Sperry M-1 Messenger
that Lawrence Sperry used to land at the U.S. Capitol. Presidents,
cabinet officials, military figures make their appearances, as do inventors
eager to promote their latest contributions to the science of aviation.
This was a time when flight had captured the public imagination—and Harris &
Ewing photographers were on hand to capture aviation history with their
cameras.
British aviator Charles E.
Lee reached Washington sometime in 1917, the year the United States entered
World War I, and he performed aircraft demonstrations at the city’s Polo Field
near the National Mall. Here he strikes a pose for a Harris & Ewing
photographer in front of a British-built Avro 504. First flown in 1913, the
Avro 504 was a popular training aircraft that remained in production until
1932. Taken at Bolling
Field on November 27, 1927, this Harris & Ewing photo shows Maine’s Senator
Frederick Hale (right) and Connecticut’s Senator Hiram Bingham III. The two
became known as “the flying senators” because they embraced the use of
airplanes for their government travels. Bingham was a pilot himself and had
flown for the U.S. during World War I. Before that he had gained fame as an
explorer who, among other exploits, rediscovered the ruins of the Incan city
Machu Picchu in Peru in 1911. The airplane behind them is a Fokker F.VII.
Lawrence Sperry emerges from his Verville-Sperry M-1
Messenger on March 22, 1922, after he nosed his little airplane up to the
steps of the U.S. Capitol. Sperry was there to demonstrate the utility of the
Messenger but also to lodge a personal complaint about money the government
owed him. With a wingspan of only 20 feet, the M-1 was intended for use by
couriers to deliver messages to the front during wartime. Sperry, who also
receives credit for the first autopilot, crashed and drowned in an M-1 while
trying to fly across the English Channel in 1923. He was not quite 31 years
old. Amelia
Earhart was a popular subject for photographers. Here she is captured at the
controls of a Stearman Hammond Y-1 airplane sometime in 1936. The airplane was
designed by Dean Hammond with help from Lloyd Stearman in response to a Bureau
of Air Commerce contest for an inexpensive, practical and safe civil airplane.
Hammond’s Y-1 was an unusual pusher airplane with a twin-tail. Already famous
as the first woman to fly across the Atlantic (as a passenger in 1928 and solo
in 1932), Earhart disappeared while making an attempt to fly around the world
in 1937. Charles Lindbergh keeps a close eye as mechanics work on
the Spirit of St. Louis, the airplane he used to cross the Atlantic in May
1927. Most likely this photo was taken in the spring of 1928 as the airplane
was being prepared for delivery to the Smithsonian Institution in downtown
Washington. Charles and Anne Morrow
Lindbergh head out onto the Potomac River on July 27, 1931, near the start of
an expedition to the North Pacific and on to Japan and China to survey
potential air routes. Their airplane is a Lockheed Sirius they had modified
and equipped with pontoons for the expedition. The Lindberghs began their trip
on Long Island Sound and flew to Washington, where they obtained passports and
other travel papers. The expedition came to an abrupt end in October when a
mishap damaged the airplane on China’s Yangtze River. The Sikorsky S-29-A was a big airplane—big
enough to carry not one but two grand pianos. Designed by Kiev native Igor
Sikorsky, the twin-engine craft was at one point the largest airplane in
America. This photograph was taken on April 23, 1925, after the S-29-A had
flown the two pianos from Roosevelt Field in New York to Washington’s Bolling
Field. One of them was intended for first lady Grace Coolidge, the other for a
local piano dealer—perhaps the man in the photo clutching a copy of Music
Trades, or the one testing one of the pianos to see how it survived the
flight. Sikorsky, who flew the airplane to Washington, is standing fourth from
the left, with his hat in his hand. Famed aviator Roscoe Turner later
purchased the S-29-A. 
U.S. Army Air Service lieutenant W.E. Melville pours
sand into a special container added to his de Havilland DH.4 at Bolling Field
in 1924. It was all part of an experiment by Dr. E. Francis Warren of Harvard
University, who theorized that sand dumped from airplanes would break up
storms. A nozzle below the wing would spray the sand into the clouds.
According to Warren, “if enough airplanes are equipped with this device, it
will not only be possible to break up clouds and cause rain but to remove fogs
from over both cities and harbors.” 
The Reverend Paul Schulte of Germany,
photographed during a visit to Washington in 1939 or 1940, became known as
“the flying priest.” In 1936 he became the first priest to perform a mass in
the air, which he did aboard the German Zeppelin Hindenburg. The Stinson
Reliant seen here bears the logo for the organization Schulte founded, the
Missionalium Vehiculorum Associatio (Missionary Vehicle Association or MIVA),
with which he intended to support missionaries in remote locations. Schulte
died in Africa in 1975. We’re not sure
what’s going on in this photo, taken sometime in 1926 at Washington’s Bolling
Field. The pilot seems equally perplexed by the gentleman with the large
tripod and a badge that reads “Fire Lines” on his belt. Members of the press
sometimes wore such badges when covering fires, so perhaps this is a news
photographer seeking some good aerial photos. The airplane appears to be a
Curtiss 17 Oriole. Secretary of
Commerce (and future president) Herbert Hoover (second from left) endures a
photo opportunity with a Fokker F.VII that was used to fly U.S. airmail. At
Hoover’s right is Anton “Anthony” Fokker, the airplane’s designer. The date
appears to be July 16, 1926, the day the first scheduled passenger service
between Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia was launched. This grass field in
Virginia across the Potomac River from Washington was even named Hoover Field
after the commerce secretary. The field no longer exists and the Pentagon now
stands on the site. Rear Admiral
Ernest J. King was chief of the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics when this
photo of him and a Curtiss SOC Seagull was taken on June 8, 1936. King, who
had earned his wings as a naval aviator in 1927, was preparing for a transfer
to San Diego to take command of the Army airfield there amid rising tensions
with Japan in the Pacific. “While other admirals have [a] floating flagship
from which to direct maneuvers, Rear Admiral King will take to the air to
direct his forces,” the photo’s caption noted. The notably acerbic admiral
went on to serve as chief of naval operations and commander in chief of the
U.S. fleet during World War II. Apparently not even George Washington,
who died almost exactly 104 years before the first flight of an airplane,
could resist the lure of aviation. Here Washington—or a reasonable
facsimile—prepares to embark from his namesake city on a plane of Ludington
Airlines. Founded in 1930, the airline was purchased by Eastern Air Transport
in 1933.
this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine
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