Baird

Andrew Blain Baird was born in 1862 in Sandhead on Luce Bay in the Rhinns of Galloway, Scotland. One of three sons, his father was a fisherman and handloom weaver. He became an apprentice to a blacksmith in Sandhead, worked as a lighthouse keeper on Lismore, then as an ironworker at Smith and McLean's on the Clyde shipyards before finally setting up on his own as a blacksmith at 113 High Street in Rothesay, Isle of Bute, when he was 25.

Baird was a daring thinker, a pioneer and innovator. He created many improvements to the plough, built a unique model of the triple expansion engine powered by electricity and was one of the original members of the Scottish Aeronautical Society.

Eager to expand his knowledge of aviation, Baird corresponded with the early aviators Louis Bleriot and S. F. Cody and exchanged information about construction of aircraft and their flight. Inspired by a visit to Blackpool for England's first ever Aviation Week in October 1909, he returned to Rothesay to design and build his own monoplane similar to Bleriot's with an engine built by the Alexander Brothers in Edinburgh. The control system he would design for his aircraft would be unlike anything that had been developed at the time. His wife sewed brown trussore silk for the wings.

The Baird monoplane was completed in the summer of 1910 and went on show at an exhibition in the Esplanade Flower Garden at the front of Bute and then to the Bute Highland Games on August 20, 1910. Stored in a barn at Cranlasgvourity, Bute,on 17 September 1910, the Baird Monoplane was taken to Ettrick Bay. Baird, assisted by Ned Striven who was an Electrical Engineer with the Burgh of Rothesay and who had assisted him with the engine and related design considerations, Baird made the monoplanes' first, and only, flight, resulting in a crash landing.

Baird never flew again after crash landing on his maiden flight on a Bute beach but his plane influenced aircraft manufacturer Thomas Sopwith. Sopwith sailed his yacht into Rothesay Bay in 1910 to visit the Marquess and to attend the Highland Games and there viewed the on display Baird monoplane. Very impressed, he was given permission to incorporate some of Baird's innovations into the aircraft he was designing.

Andrew Blain Baird died in Rothesay, Isle of Bute Scotland on September 9, 1951.