Charles A. A. Dellschau
(1830–1923)
BornBerlin, Prussia (now Germany)
DiedHouston, Texas, United States
BiographyThe Sonora Aero Club of California designed incredible flying machines in the 1850s, decades before the Wright Brothers took to the skies: airships held aloft by propellers and striped balloons, complete with landing gear and platforms for observing the heavens. Or at least that is what Charles A. A. Dellschau claimed to recount in his thousands of richly colored watercolor and ink drawings that were brought to public light posthumously, as he never shared his supposed membership in this secret society. He made the drawings double-sided to show the “aeros,” as he called them, from multiple angles, inside and out, and his annotations included descriptions of details such as the antigravity liquid that would power them.Why Dellschau so lavishly imagined this alternate history of aviation is unknown, and the timeline of his life remains a loose sketch through his sporadic appearances in historical archives. He is known to have immigrated to the United States from Prussia in the mid-nineteenth century, eventually settling in Texas. Based on the dates of his drawings, collated in handmade notebooks, he spent around two decades on this creative work, roughly from 1899 to 1923, when he died in Houston. Whether he ever went to California is not definitively recorded, nor is how he learned his skilled draftsmanship while mainly working as a butcher (butcher paper frequently served as his canvas) or what inspired his interest in aeronautics. Newspaper clippings related to early flight are incorporated into the drawings—such as one from 1920 reading “Flyer Saves Life in Daring Exploit” collaged into the sphere of a dirigible-like contraption with a decorative scheme reminiscent of a circus tent—showing how he followed updates in local newspapers and publications such as Scientific American.
Dellschau’s drawings were rescued from the trash in the 1960s after they had been cleared from his family home, and an early exhibition was held at the University of St. Thomas in Houston after they captivated an art student named Mary Jane Victor in 1969. Almost lost to obscurity, he is now recognized as one of the earliest visionary artists in the United States, showing how technological innovation and its dissemination in media was inspiring new thoughts about the future. As he wrote on one drawing recalling the great feats of these intrepid aeronauts, “You are not forgotten.”
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).