Modern Languages and Modern Flight

His helicopter-like flying machine reached the heights of the heavens — lifted by the whirling blades of angels.

Or were they demons?

NC State modern languages professor Abraham Rudy, a Russian-born lover of linguistics, dreamed that the rotor-driven mechanism he built out of used bicycle parts would revolutionize the budding aviation industry that had started just four years prior, when the Wright Brothers took flight on North Carolina’s Outer Banks in 1903.

He hoped organizations like the Aero Club he established at N.C. A&M (as NC State was then known) soon after arriving on campus in 1907 would help him get his cockamamie machine off the ground. Sadly, the prankish students who helped him construct the far-fetched device only brought him ridicule and heartbreak.

Rudy was one of the great characters of NC State’s early history. Hired by president George Tayloe Winston as the school’s first designated foreign languages professor, the native of Riga, Russia (now Latvia) was fluent in multiple European languages. He was just returning to the United States after several years of teaching in the Philippine Islands, where he also served in the military during the Spanish-American War, and he was eager to prove that the classicist philosophy of foreign languages would be of benefit to a technical and agricultural college.

The professor with a Ph.D. in pedagogy came to Raleigh to teach modern languages, to find a permanent faith and, striving with all his sartorial might, to attract a life partner. Born into the Jewish faith in Russia, he converted to Methodism and Presbyterianism in hopes of increasing his dating pool in North Carolina’s mostly Protestant capital. Rudy made these drastic changes after he was sadly twice left standing at an empty platform at New York’s Grand Central Station, jilted by two different Russian mail-order brides.

He eventually found a partner once he returned to the religion of his birth and expanded his courting experiences to Chicago.

Rudy was an unusual teacher for his time, relying on a version of experiential education that required classroom conversation instead of structured learning to teach Esperanto, the constructed international auxiliary language that was supposed to allow speakers of multiple European languages such as German, Spanish and French to communicate with each other. With simplified grammar and a reduced vocabulary, the language was developed in 1887 to improve international communication and understanding.

Students knew Rudy as a campus eccentric that they called “Herr Professor” and “Señor Doctah Rudy,” often mimicking his slight accent and taking advantage of his non-native’s gullibility. During a time when hazing was a generally accepted practice and campus pranks were a regular occurrence, they made his life, in a word, miserable during his seven and a half years (1907-13) on campus.

Apparently, Rudy could not adapt himself to his surroundings and many tales are told of his classroom conduct, courting proclivities, Esperanto classes, and especially of his flying machine.

There was an air of anarchy among the students of that time, at least according to this historical sketch (pp. 3-5) written by NC State alumni leader E.B. Owen (1898): “The college had its rules and regulations, but none seemed to cover such matters as the placing of a cow on the roof of the Mechanics Building, the tying of a blind mule on the top floor of Watauga Hall, and the locking of a bear in Pullen Hall, to the consternation of Dean Thomas P. Harrison and [vice president Carl W.] Riddick and the delight of students who were tired of compulsory chapel. These and other pranks were exceptions in a routine of serious work.”

Similarly, fellow professors and administrators didn’t quite know how to deal with a colleague who loved being part of Raleigh’s society as much as he loved his teaching or tinkering. He just wasn’t very good at any of it.

“Apparently, Rudy could not adapt himself to his surroundings and many tales are told of his classroom conduct, courting proclivities, Esperanto classes, and especially of his flying machine,” wrote historian David Lockmiller in “History of N.C. State College” in 1939.

Ah, the flying machine.

Built on a bicycle frame in a Peele Hall basement workshop, the rotary-wing device was Rudy’s mechanical baby. Though he was a language teacher, he spent untold hours and some $800 of his $1,200 annual salary putting it together, with the help of his language students.

Using hand or leg power to turn the overhead propeller, Rudy’s innovative flyer was way ahead of its time, a combination of Leonardo Da Vinci’s theoretical turning screw and the aviation reality introduced around the same time by Russian engineer Igor Sikorsky.

Ultimately, however, he became a medieval alchemist, chasing a dream invention that never materialized.

Well, technically, that’s not true. Rudy’s one-manpower machine did leave the ground once while he was in Raleigh, though he had nothing to do with it.

When the students and the people of the community awoke next morning, they beheld the flying machine on top of the old smokestack …

Early one morning the entire city awoke to see the professor’s flying machine a full 93 feet off the ground, perched high atop a campus smokestack behind Holladay Hall. It seems some of his Aero Club members and apprentice engineers had spent the previous night using ropes, pulleys and their nascent mechanical skills to lift Rudy’s machine to the top of the brick chimney.

“When the students and the people of the community awoke next morning, they beheld the flying machine on top of the old smokestack which stood in front of our first power house, which was in the open place behind Holladay Hall, not far from the drinking fountain,” wrote Fountain. “There it was, shining in the clear morning light.

“Numerous students undertook to get pictures of it, but no one got a satisfactory picture because of the distance upwards.”

Rudy was humiliated.

“Getting it down was job enough, for it must have weighed a good deal more than a hundred pounds, and the men who hauled it up there must have had some engineering genius, for they had to go up inside the stack and pull it up outside from the top,” Fountain wrote. “It was really a wonderful feat, considering the weight of the thing, the height of the stack and the facilities the boys had for taking it up. Dr. Rudy was surely one mad man, but he cooled off after a while and though it was never funny to him, he did not take it so seriously later on.”

After he married, he abandoned his helicopter experimentation and left NC State in the summer of 1915, bound for a teaching position at the University of South Carolina. He eventually found his way to Mexico, where he rebooted his quest for rotary flight. He published the paper “Development of the Helicopter Moved by Man Power” in the Mexico City magazine Aviación.

He then faded into history.

Rudy left NC State’s modern language department to Professor Larry Hinkle, who found the classes “very much disorganized and, in fact, demoralized,” according to the NC State Alumni News. “When the new professor began to demand work, the boys began to change their classes, electing something else until during that spring there was just a little modern languages taught. Professor Hinkle had to build up his department from new material largely during the next two or three years. That he has succeeded admirably is well known.”

The department, now known as the Department of World Languages and Cultures, has soared in the 118 years since Rudy first taught classes in Esperanto.

Even higher than his hoisted helicopter.

In Campus Characters, we explore some of the people who, through the years, have given NC State’s campus a different spice and flair. If you’d like to suggest someone to profile, email Tim Peeler at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.