Born 15 April 1891 in Hagenau/Alsace

Paul Senge built a monoplane in 1910.

Died 8 September 1913 bei Elsen, Grevenbroich)

Born in Eureka in 1885, the 1905 Santa Rosa directory lists him as “G. Blaine Selvage,” and his family genealogists state his birth name was Gelespie Blaine Selvage, which is probably a corruption of his grandfather’s name, Guissippe Selvaggi. At some point before 1909, he swapped the middle name and initial and was known as Blaine G. Selvage for the remainder of his life.

Blaine Selvage
Humboldt City CA.
USA

Built a monoplane in 1909.

Blaine’s trail is hard to follow over the next forty years. The 1913 Eureka directory shows him working as a machinist, and married in 1916 to a woman named Faye. That marriage appears to have not lasted long; Mrs. Faye Selvage is in Eureka the following year, but not him. We find Blaine next in 1923, working as a machinist in Stockton, then a building contractor in San Mateo, 1938. Selvage returned to Santa Rosa in his final years and operated businesses dealing in concrete. In 1953 he filed for a patent on a “combined wheelbarrow and cement mixer,” still the inventive thinker.

Blaine G. Selvage, unmarried and childless, died here on July 4, 1967, at the age of 81. No obituary for him appeared in either the Santa Rosa or Eureka newspapers. So forgotten was he at death that even his grave was unmarked, and so it still remains.

In 1913 William Sellick, Cicero IL., USA built a single-place, mid-wing Blériot redesign. Powered by an Elbridge 4 engine, it flew successfully, but his follow-on creation, based on a French Nieuport Centre-Wing with an Anzani motor, didn’t fare as well. Pathè movie newsreel cameraman Curtis Pritchard convinced him he should be its test pilot, despite never having flown before. Sellick relented and, after some verbal flight instruction, watched Pritchard take-off too soon and too abruptly, with the inevitable splintering crash. Pritchard suffered a broken leg, but the plane was a total loss.

In 1909 the pilot Gaudard founded the Société d’Étude pour la Locomotion Aérienne (SELA). G Badini, their designer, built two similar aircraft powered by 55 hp Aviatik engines, one appeared in 1910 at St Cyr, the other, a variant, in 1911.