If I may, the importance of Jatho in the history of flight might have been a tad exaggerated, at least in Germany.
Karl Jatho (1873-1933) was a German civil servant who, according to his notebooks, completed a gasoline powered aeroplane no later than August 1903, in Hanover. He managed to make an uncontrolled 60 or so feet hop on 18 August. Damaged before the end of that month when it overturned, that triplane was turned into a biplane over the following weeks. By November 1903, Jatho claimed to have covered, seemingly with little control, a distance of 195 or so feet.
The catch with those statements was that no trace of a single article has been found in German newspapers of the time. Worse still perhaps, the research conducted in Jatho’s notebooks really began only in 1933, possibly after the March 1933 election which saw Adolf Hitler’s political party become the dominant one in Germany.
If truth be told, the first newspapers articles detailing Jatho’s efforts to fly seemed to date from March 1907. His first flight might have occurred only in 1908. Jatho might, I repeat might, have completed 3 or 4 aeroplanes between 1907 and 1909.
It is worth noting that the rebuilt triplane aeroplane that Karl Jatho allegedly tested in August 1903 was on display at the Internationale Sport-Ausstellung Berlin 1907, held in Berlin, in April and May 1907.
In any event, a monument was unveiled, in October 1933, in the presence of an elderly Jatho, at what was then the airport of Hanover, a monument with the NSDAP eagle and swastika which also included the word Jatho and the date 18 August 1903 with, in between, the following words, translated here, The first powered aircraft of the world, an utterly inaccurate statement.
A replica of Jatho’s 1903 aeroplane whose accuracy cannot be ascertained was built so that it would fly on the day of the ceremony. Bad weather prevented that flight from taking place, however.
Put on display at the airport in the fall of 1933, the replica moved to Berlin in 1936, when it became one of the aircraft of the Deutsche Luftfahrtsammlung, the most impressive aviation museum in Europe, if not the world. It was presumably destroyed during one of the two 1943 and 1944 Allied bombings raids which pulverised many if not most of the aircraft in the museum’s collection.
Another replica was completed in 2006 as part of a German project known as Wir waren die Ersten, or We were the first. Bad weather, in September, prevented a test flight from taking place. As of 2025, that replica was seemingly on display in Hanover's airport, one of the busiest in Germany.
Also in 2006, a regional history working group unveiled a memorial stone dedicated to Jatho on the site where the August 1903 flight had allegedly taken place.
