_June 2010 _ THE THREE ROOMS THAT constitute the offices of the Aereon Corp. are tucked away on the second floor of a brick building near the Princeton University campus. The narrow hallway is lined with gray doors, many of which have hand-lettered business signs on them. You have to know the Aereon offices are there to find them. The furniture inside harks back to the post-war era, with heavy, gray metal desks, tables and filing cabinets. Stacks of papers and proposals crowd various surfaces throughout the rooms. It is a very far cry from the shiny headquarters offices of Boeing or Lockheed-Martin.
This tiny little company has, arguably, the longest lineage of any firm in aviation — a lineage that dates all the way back to 1863. That’s the year that an inventor named Solomon Andrews — a versatile and visionary man who also invented the combination lock — built and flew a triple-hulled, gravity-powered airship he called the Aereon. Andrews envisioned building the airships for the Union Army as surveillance and reconnaissance vehicles. He might even have succeeded, except then Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and the Civil War ended. And without the exigencies of a war, interest in Andrews’ invention faded. He tried to generate interest in a civilian version and even flew a single-hull airship from lower Manhattan up to Brookville, Long Island, one time, but he never got the funding he needed to do anything more with the idea.
