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1962
A museum begun in a former high school moved to a winery
The museum was founded in the summer of 1962 by Otto Kohl. It was first housed in a former high school. In 1992 it moved to a former winery building south of Hammondsport. The 60,000 square foot facility has a collection of aircraft, vintage motorcycles, automobiles and aircraft engines.
A boy
Born in Hammondsport, Curtiss had schooling only to eighth grade
Glenn Curtiss was born in 1878 in Hammondsport, at the southern tip of Keuka Lake. His formal education extended only to eighth grade. At his first job, at the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company in Rochester, he built a stencil machine, a rack with a brush on a hinge that stenciled one hundred paper strips with a single stroke. The company adopted it.
Motorcycles
A tomato soup can carburetor led to a world record in 1907
Curtiss began making motorcycles in 1902. His first motorcycle's carburetor was adapted from a tomato soup can containing a gauze screen. In 1903 he set a motorcycle land speed record at 64 miles per hour for one mile. On January 24, 1907, in Ormond Beach, Florida, he set an unofficial world record on a V-8 motorcycle of his own design. That motorcycle is now in the Smithsonian Institution.
136.36miles per hour, an unofficial world record in 1907
“...the greatest motor expert in the country”
Alexander Graham Bell, on Curtiss
1908
On July 4, 1908 he flew nearly a mile in the AEA June Bug
In 1907 Curtiss joined the Aerial Experiment Association, a research group founded by Alexander Graham Bell to build flying machines. On July 4, 1908, he flew nearly a mile with the AEA June Bug, recording the first public flight in North America. It won him the Scientific American prize, and a lawsuit with the Wright Brothers, who had declined to fly in public.
1909 and 1910
In 1909 he won the Gordon Bennett trophy; in 1910 he flew across New York
In 1909 Curtiss won the Gordon Bennett Aviation Trophy at the world's first international air meet, in France. In 1910 he made the first long-distance flight in the U.S., across New York State. The museum holds over 20 aircraft, including reproductions of the AEA June Bug and the Curtiss Model D, and 16 automobiles, the majority on loan.
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The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Glenn H. Curtiss Museum and the Wikipedia article Glenn Curtiss, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.