Donald Beatty

Donald Croom Beatty (April 11, 1900 – July 12, 1980) was an American aviator, explorer, and inventor.

Beatty was the son of Isaac Beatty, Jr and Hughie Duffee Beatty of Birmingham, Alabama (United States). He began his flying career as a teenager by soloing a small plane he constructed himself with a motorcycle engine at his grandfather's farm near Tarrant on June 16, 1916. The flight ended with a crash landing. Not long afterward he designed and constructed a hand-powered submarine which he sank in Homewood's Edgewood Lake.

After a year at Marion Military Institute, Beatty got permission from his father to enlist in the United States Navy at age 17. He was sent to the Navy Radio School set up at Harvard University. In 1919 the United Fruit Company hired him to construct and install wireless (radio) telegraphy equipment along its steamer routes in Asia. He reportedly constructed the first voice radio station in mainland China during that engagement.

After returning to Alabama, Beatty joined James Meissner and a few fellow aviators to form the "Birmingham Flying Club" in 1919 at their own "Roberts Field". The unit was recognized as the 135th Observation Squadron, the state's first Air National Guard unit, on January 21, 1922. Beatty qualified as a military pilot at Maxwell Field in Montgomery and, in 1924, was commissioned as a 1st Lieutenant in the United States Army Air Corps.

In 1921 Beatty constructed Alabama's first experimental voice radio station, then called WIAG on the second floor of the Matthews Electric building. He used the station to broadcast weather reports to the few receiver-equipped pilots in range and had his flying student and girlfriend Mary Alice Gatling play the piano in the broadcast booth (presumably the first live broadcast of music in Alabama). An improved radio circuit Beatty developed for the station was the subject of his first U. S. patent, awarded in 1922.

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