A young inventor’s persistent experiments led to pioneering success in aviation.
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A San Francisco lad, Cleve T. Shaffer, of the Potrero district, has perfected a soaring machine that he is now manufacturing for the market. He has the first airship factory in the West and is advertising for business. The Shaffer glider is marketed as a pleasure device. The pastime of scudding over fields at lightning speed is recommended as entirely safe and most exhilarating. Shaffer is twenty years old.
While building his gliders for the trade Shaffer, in a shop established in the rear of his home, is fitting an enlarged glider with a power motor which he declares will make of it a biplane-aeroplane superior to those of the Wrights, Bleriot, Curtiss, Latham, Paulhan and the other aviators already famous.
Shaffer is secretary of the Pacific Aero Club, the lively little organization of air-travel zealots which has sprung from the widespread interest in the new field of experimentation in San Francisco. The story of Shaffer’s efforts to solve the aviation problem is inspiring. Tho a mere boy, he is a “pioneer” in aerial experimentation. Without funds and without any suggestion, support or encouragement from older persons, Shaffer as a boy of fifteen years, at a time when aviation was a subject engaging the attention of only a handful of men in the entire world, began persistent and systematic experiments. The lad became the laughing-stock of his home district in the Potrero hills. He was looked upon as a freak, a child with something wrong in his make-up--because of his unquenchable mania for air-travel experiments.--_Sunset Magazine._
