After years of effort, Miss E. Lillian Todd, of No. 131 West Twenty-third street, realized her ambition on Nov 7, 1910, when she had the pleasure of seeing a biplane, the work of her hands and brain, fly across the Garden City aviation field.

Designed and built by E. Lillian Todd and first flown by Didier Masson over the Garden City aviation field in Long Island during November of 1910.

Miss Todd was well known at the time, and her 1910 Biplane, powered by an eight cylinder 60 hp Rinek engine, was the first successful aeroplane built by an American woman. She then tried to get an engine, but met with repeated defeat, as the engines which she tried were not suitable. Finally a modified Rinek motor was declared satisfactory. Todd is told to have designed and built three full-size aircraft; her first – an engineless machine – in 1906.

A good sized crowd was on hand to witness the first attempt to fly the biplane. Mr. Didier Masson was the aviator. He ran the machine across the ground, then went to the air for twenty feet and made a turn at the far end, returning to the starting place, where he was enthusiastically received by Miss Todd and the crowd.

Miss Elizabeth L. Todd has entered the lists as a competitor in several long-distance flights and she has her mechanicians at work in her aerodrome at Hempstead Plains on three machines she designed. She has made several flights and has learned to manipulate her planes and her engines in masterly style.

Belgian brothers Maurice and Ernest Tips designed in 1908 a machine that would rise and land vertically while transitioning to and from horizontal flight. Their solution to this challenge opted for a canard type biplane, driven by three-bladed propellers which could be rotated, thus given the need for space, the middle section of the wing was almost completely open. The engine to power this complex design was Belgian-made by the firm Pipe, and construction was done in Etterbeeke (now part of Brussels). The machine was not successful however, and the brothers persevered onward and re-designed their machine – using as many parts as already available – whereas they dropped the idea of starting and landing vertically. The second version of the Tips machine was a biplane which resembled the original quite closely, but fitted with two “fixed” two-bladed propellers. Almost everything else was the same, save the engine of Pipe which was at a later time changed to a 50 hp Gnôme rotary. The machine flew during 1909 and 1910 earning the distinction (with the Pipe engine that is) of being the first Belgian plane of construction (inclusive the engine) to do so.