March 14, 1915: Airplane wins automobile race on ice

On this day in Duluth in 1915, an airplane flown by Duluthian Harry Webster beat Ray Buchanan’s automobile “The National” which was driving on a frozen Lake Superior. Wilson kept his plane at his “aeroshed” along the lake shore at Fourteenth Avenue East and mentioned to newspapers that “the ice on the lake makes an admirable aviation field.” Wilson’s plane held an 8-h.p. Curtiss engine, and the amateur aviator paid for it by giving rides over the city. He made most of his money at carnivals and exhibition flights. He lost a second race to Buchanan, whose car was clocked at seventy miles an hour. Buchanan was there to race other autoists, including Dr. J. D. Park, whose “Locomobile” won a $5,000 prize in an American Automobile Association ice race the previous year in Minneapolis. Buchanan beat Park and all other contenders in Duluth in 1913, but the paper’s failed to mention that year’s prize. Meanwhile, the newspaper offhandedly mentioned that on one flight, Webster “soared to a height of 1,200 feet over Superior Street and dropped a bomb of his own manufacture which exploded 150 feet below the machine.”