If Mosquito Hawks Can Fly

Charles Frederick Page (born 1864 in Rapides Parish, Louisiana; born into slavery) is the subject of a Family Lore episode that traces a piece of family oral history — that Page designed and built an airship and tried to exhibit it at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition — into documentary records and a modern effort to restore his legacy. Host Lloyd Lockridge interviews Page’s grandson, Joseph P. Page, who recounts decades of family certainty and outside skepticism. Local historian Michael Wynn discovered a 1906 Alexandria Town Talk article about Page and located original patent papers retained by Page’s daughter Eva; the U.S. patent for Page’s “improvements to airships” was issued April 10, 1906. The patent drawings show a wire-frame hull covered with oiled canvas, two large gas bags, pumps/valves/pistons, and a rear propeller and rudder — a design for a controllable lighter-than-air craft quite different from the Wright brothers’ airplane.

The narrative follows two converging threads: the mystery of the disappearing machine and the larger pattern of Black inventors being marginalized. Family lore says Page’s completed craft was freighted to St. Louis for the 1904 exposition and never arrived; the episode’s reporting does not recover the physical craft, so its fate remains unresolved. Lockridge contextualizes the 1904 fair’s hotly contested airship events (noting contestants like Santos-Dumont and Tom Baldwin and incidents of sabotage and runaway balloons) and observes that Page’s patent was issued about one month before the Wright brothers’ patent — a technical-but-different milestone. Investigative threads uncovered three pieces of correspondence, including a valuation letter from C.G. Crispin offering $30,000 and an envelope from A. Arthur (Adam Arthur), later implicated in a Chicago patent-exhibit swindle, which plausibly explains why Page abandoned commercial follow-through. James Howard, founder of the Black Inventors Hall of Fame, embraced Page’s story as emblematic, commissioned 3D modeling from the patent art, and — with Spirit in the Sky and engineers in Maine — began building a full-size replica (under construction as of the episode) intended for museum display. The episode balances unresolved skepticism with archival confirmation and reframes Page’s experience as part of structural obstacles that have historically blocked recognition and commercial success for Black inventors.