The Hammondsport company that we now know as Mercury Aircraft, or Mercury Corporation, got its start in 1920 as the Aerial Service Corporation. Founder Henry Kleckler, and others in key positions through the years, were former Curtiss men. (Ownership changed hands several times in the first twenty years or so.) As they said, “Service” was their middle name. They did a lot of things in aviation, and one of them was to build airplanes.
*In 1922 they built two racing airplanes for the navy, plus a monoplane for an exhibition pilot. All of these were designed by another Hammondsport firm, the Aerial Engineering Corporation, which hired Aerial Service to do the construction.
*In 1925 came the Aerial Mercury, designed for a competition to create a new air mail plane. The post office liked it, bought it, and used it for years, but never made any follow-up orders. It made enough of a splash, though, that its name soon became the company name.
*Also in 1925 they bought a number of surplus Model J biplanes made by Standard Aircraft and rebuilt them extensively. We can argue about whether to count these as airplanes manufactured by Mercury, but at any rate we don’t know how many there were, although the Argentine government bought five to use as trainers.
*Also in 1925 came the single Mercury Junior, which led to the larger Aerial Mercury retroactively being called the Mercury Senior. The single Mercury Kitten appeared in 1927, and an innovative airplane designed for a safety competition came two years later.
*None of these resulted in production contracts, but the 1929 Mercury Chic DID. This was a two-seater parasol-wing open-cockpit monoplane, and the Curtiss flying school in Chicago took five of them as part of a special package… learn to fly and take home the Chic you trained on, all for a single price.
*The Chic was a well thought-of airplane, and the future looked bright, but 1929 was the year of the stock market crash. With the Great Depression under way, not too many people were signing up for the lessons-plus-airplane deal. About 16 or 18 Chics were manufactured (one source says as many as 30), but a number of them were never actually assembled. Instead, the components were crated to wait (mostly vainly) for a buyer.
*(By the way, in 1930 Harvey Mummert put Billy Mummert and Joe Meade, Jr. into the front cockpit of a Chic, and piloted the aircraft as the boys tossed flowers out onto the crowd at Glenn Curtiss’s burial.)
*Otto Kohl and Harvey Mummert created the Red Racer in 1929, and the White Racer followed in 1931. Mercury squeaked through the Depression and boomed during the war, but made no more airplanes until 1976, when Joe Meade, Jr. and a team of Mercury men reproduced the 1908 June Bug originally designed and flown by Glenn Curtiss. (Joe had planned a static reproduction, but Cole Palen of Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome told him, “It isn’t an airplane unless it flies.”) Fly it did, at Hammondsport, Dansville, and Oskosh, piloted by Joe, by Cole, by Dave Fox, and by Harry Saltsman, all of whom are now gone.
*How many Mercury aircraft are left today? Two or three Chics, including one at Curtiss Museum, and the White Racer, also at Curtiss. The June Bug II is at Curtiss as well, and the remnants of the Red Racer still theoretically existed around the year 2000, though it would be too generous to have called it a basket case. So to see the wings of Mercury – Curtiss is where you have to go!