CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: The Silver Dart Over Baddeck Bay

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On February 23, 1909, a crowd of local residents gathered on the frozen surface of Baddeck Bay, on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, to watch a strange machine of bamboo, wire and fabric race across the ice. After a short run, the Silver Dart lifted into the air and flew for roughly 800 metres before settling back down. It was the first controlled, powered aeroplane flight in Canada. The choice of setting was a practical one. In the hilly, wooded countryside around the village, a long, flat and unobstructed stretch of land was hard to find, while a frozen bay offered exactly that for several months each winter.

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The aircraft was the work of the Aerial Experiment Association, a small group led by Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, who had built his summer home near Baddeck. For years, Bell had been testing enormous kites made of many small three-dimensional triangular cells, and these experiments had convinced him that people would one day fly. The group was formed in 1907 at the suggestion of his wife, Mabel, who also paid its expenses from her own funds. Its other members were much younger: two young engineers from the University of Toronto, J.A.D. McCurdy and Frederick “Casey” Baldwin; an American engine builder, Glenn Curtiss; and a United States Army officer, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge. Selfridge never saw the Silver Dart fly. In 1908, while riding as a passenger with Orville Wright, he became the first person to die in the crash of a powered aeroplane.

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Before coming to Cape Breton, the group designed and tested three earlier aircraft at Hammondsport, New York, Curtiss’s home town, and each one borrowed lessons from the last. The Silver Dart was the fourth, and it made its first flights there in December 1908 before being shipped north to Baddeck. Its name came from the silvery, rubberized fabric stretched over its wings, and it was powered by a water-cooled engine that Curtiss had designed. McCurdy, who had grown up in Baddeck, was chosen as its pilot, so the people cheering on the ice that February afternoon were watching one of their own. In the weeks that followed, he took the machine up many more times, gradually flying farther and learning to make turns over the bay.

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The association broke up only a few weeks after the historic flight, but its story did not end there. McCurdy and Baldwin hoped to persuade Canada’s military that aircraft had a future, yet demonstration flights at Petawawa, Ontario, later that year ended with the Silver Dart damaged on landing, and the officers who watched remained unconvinced. McCurdy nevertheless stayed involved in aviation for decades and later served as Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia. Today, visitors to the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site in Baddeck can learn about the Silver Dart alongside Bell’s many other inventions, and in 2009 the flight’s hundredth anniversary was marked with celebrations in the village.