SAW FIRST MAIL PLANE START

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 152, 23 March 1939, Page 7

SAW FIRST MAIL PLANE START

Visitor From New York AUTHORITY ON POSTAL SERVICES Dr. Thaddeus P. Hyatt, a former lecturer to the Education Department of New York, who is visiting a relative In Wellington, had the experience in 1911 of seeing the first aeroplane to carry mails take off on its journey. Dr. Hyatt has consented to deliver a lecture in Wellington on April 3 on the “History of Postal Services,” a lecture which the visitor will illustrate with many lantern slides. Dr. Hyatt is not, and never has been, a postal official, but wars one. of the first authorities on dentistry in New York some 40 years ago. One of his hobbies happened to’ be collecting postage stamps, of which, at one time, he bad a fine collection. To supply some information on stamps he was on one occasion sent for by the postmaster of Brooklyn, New York, and it was after that that he began to make. researches into the earlier postal services of the world, and those of the United States in particular, till he was such an authority that some 20 years ago he used to lecture to the schools of New York on the subject. He tells rather a good story of one experience. “It was seldom that the lecturers of the Education Department were sent to I the same school twice,” said Dr. Hyatt. "I had lectured on the care of the teeth art one school near the western waterfront, opposite 42nd Street, and a year later found that I was down to lecture on the history of postal services at the same school. After the lecture I was about to leave the hall, when the door was blocked by a huge longshoreman, who asked: ‘Are you the man who lectured about teeth here a year ago?’ I replied that I was. He just looked at me and said: ‘Then how comes it that you are lecturing on postal services?’ I answered that I had studied the subject among others, and would be pleased to lecture on ‘The Rise and Fall of Man’ or any other subject if he gave me a little notice. He looked at me with amazement, and then said, •Don’t you ever sleep?’ and with that he stalked away. But to me the interesting fact was that such a type of man should be attending such lectures regularly.”

Dr. Hyatt has another connexion with postal services in the United States. Away back in 1857 his father, also Dr. Thaddeus Hyatt, offered in the “Scientific American” a prize of 1000 dollars to anyone who could design a practical heavier-than-air flying machine. In 1882 the same man wrote a book on aviation entitled “The Dragon Fly,” and in 1911 his eldest son (the present Dr. Hyatt) attended at the Nassau Field, Long Island, and saw the first aeroplane to takeoff the earth with mails. Its name was the “Dragon Fly.” yet its maker, Earl Ovington, had never heard of Dr. Hyatt senior’s book of that. name. Dr. Hyatt had been specially invited to see that historic first flight with mails, and had been privileged to stamp and send a letter by that plane. He has a pictorial slide of the event, which he will exhibit during his lecture.