Gray Goose Airways Stock Certificate signed by the inventor Jonathan Edward Cald For Sale

Uncanceled Stock. Canada Goose logo with "The Gray Goose Airways" at side. One would wonder if this had anything to do with Howard Hughes? Fresh Excellent Condition and Extremely Rare! Gray Goose Airways allegedly developed a flying machine that flapped its wings like a goose. On its first flight the contraption, connected to the motorcycle, set the heavily-braced wings into a flapping frenzy, but before it got any serious ideas about flying, the tail broke off, landed on its inventor, but didn't kill him. Jonathan Edward Caldwell was something of a mystery even to his close relatives, and his strange career can only be reconstructed in spotty form through newspaper clippings, patent documents and newsreel scripts. According to college records, Caldwell was born in Hensall, Ontario, Canada in 1883 and attended Oregon State College 1912-13, majoring in mechanical engineering. In the 1920s, according to statements he made later in life, Caldwell became interested in aviation and began to study the fundamentals of aerodynamics, gleaning scraps of knowledge from textbooks and encyclopedias. In Feb 1923, while living in Santa Monica CA, he filed an application for a patent covering a rather bizarre aircraft, a "Cyclogyro" that was designed to take off vertically and transition to forward flight. The plane's "wings" were actually small airfoil blades mounted in Ferris wheel-like rotating frames protruding from either side of a conventional aircraft fuselage. The Cyclogyro patent was granted in the summer of 1927, but by the end of that year Caldwell, then living in Denver, filed another patent on an even more impractical human-powered, flapping-wing aircraft, or "ornithopter." This contraption looked like a rowboat with birdlike wings. These wings were equipped with dozens of flexible fabric valves which were supposed to open on the upstroke and close on the downstroke. Power for the flapping action was to be provided by the pilot, who would need to be highly athletic, to say the least. With this concept Caldwell founded Gray Goose Airways to raise capital to build his ornithopter and incorporated the firm under Nevada laws in 1928, with the first shares of stock being sold in Denver that year. He planned to issue 10,000 shares of Gray Goose stock at ten cents per share, while retaining a 51 percent interest, and actually succeeded in selling between $8,000 and $10,000 worth. By 1931 Caldwell had failed to produce a viable ornithopter in Nevada and Colorado and moved his enterprise to the east coast, evidently first to Orangeburg NY and, later, to Madison NJ. In early 1932 he was actively promoting Gray Goose Airways as a new passenger and freight airline, with himself as secretary-treasurer and his wife Olive as president. A newsreel filmed on Jan 14 shows the Caldwells conducting a demonstration of the ornithopter, which was "piloted" in a futile attempt at flight by a man with the unlikely name of Emile Harrier. According to the newsreel's script, Olive makes a statement to the interviewer in which she cites the examples of Alexander Graham Bell and Marconi, pioneers in their fields, and claims that the Gray Goos Item ordered may not be exact piece shown. All original and authentic.