Marvel Studios released its first
female superhero film, Captain Marvel,
in early 2019. The character was based
on Marvel Comics’ own Captain Marvel
developed by Stan Lee and Gene Colan in 1967.
But Marvel Comics did not create the name, “Captain Marvel.” They paid-off M. F. Enterprises to cease
publication of its Captain Marvel
comic books series in 1966, due in part to trademark concerns related to the
similarity between the character’s name and Marvel Comics’ company name.
But interestingly, the name “Captain
Marvel” predates even the name of Marvel Comics, which assumed the name in
1961, after many years doing business as Timely Comics or Magazine
Management. The original, “real” Captain Marvel was created by Fawcett
Comics in 1940. Although it was the
best-selling super-hero comic book of the 1940s (outselling Superman and Batman), spawning a successful theatrical “chapter play” serial, The Adventures of Captain Marvel,
Fawcett Comics abandoned the character in the early-1950s, due in part to
decreasing sales, but also in an effort to settle a copyright infringement suit
brought by the owners of Superman.
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Pittsburgh Press, April 4, 1941, page 59.
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“Captain Marvel,” fabulous cartoon
hero and superman, is shown here in his first action-photo, diving from
the top of a 10-story building . . . .
Tampa Bay Times
(St. Petersburg, Florida), November 1, 1941, page 13.
DC Comics revived Fawcett’s old Captain Marvel as Shazam in the 1970s, “Shazam” being the magical phrase the original
Captain Marvel recited to assume his
superpowers. The new, revised Shazam was a live-action Saturday
morning children’s TV series in the 1970s and Warner Brothers’ Shazam, the movie, is set for release in
April 2019.
But unlike all of the fictional Captain Marvels based on earlier Captain Marvels or Superman, the real Captain Marvel (like the real Captain America) was an actual hero who helped save
the world from German expansionism in World War I.
His super-powers? – flight and wireless telecommunication.
Captain Orin E. Marvel
The real “Capt. O. E. Marvel, head of
Audiometer service,” seen here (standing) in Life Magazine (September 3, 1940, page 15) a few months after Fawcett
Comics’ original Captain Marvel first
hit the newsstands.
Orin E. Marvel was born in Bronson,
Kansas in 1885. At the age of 21, he was
installing telephones in Bronson for the Mutual Company,[i]
a job that foreshadowed the rest of his career.
Shortly afterward, he attended the University of Kansas in Lawrence,
graduating in 1912.
By 1914, he was working at Bell Labs[ii]
and had reportedly already earned his first patent for “measuring and filling
transmitter buttons.”[iii]
In February 1916, as a member of the Missouri National Guard Signal Corps, he was sent to El Paso, Texas for border service in response to border-raids by Pancho Villa; first as a Private, and then in quick succession a Corporal (June 24), Seargent (July 1) and a 1st Lieutenant, skipping right past 2d Lieutenant; he was back in Kansas City on recruiting duty before the end of the year.[iv] Within two years he would be a Captain –Captain Marvel, a title he held for the rest of his life.
In February 1916, as a member of the Missouri National Guard Signal Corps, he was sent to El Paso, Texas for border service in response to border-raids by Pancho Villa; first as a Private, and then in quick succession a Corporal (June 24), Seargent (July 1) and a 1st Lieutenant, skipping right past 2d Lieutenant; he was back in Kansas City on recruiting duty before the end of the year.[iv] Within two years he would be a Captain –Captain Marvel, a title he held for the rest of his life.
Captain Marvel was in France as a
member of the Army Air Service by February 1918. He saw combat in France, even going “over the
top” in Baccarat, France carrying (appropriately enough) a radio.
Then we moved to Baccarat and took over a sector. It is here we had our first real experience
of going over the top. It is a great
experience to stand in a trench with about a million shells going over and
waiting until it is light enough to see and then up and over. I went over with ground radio sets for
communications back to regimental headquarters.
A letter home, published in the Bronson Pilot, December 25, 1918, page
1.
Captain Marvel was near Chalons,
France in July 1918 when his unit came under heavy fire. He kept the radios up and running for three
days under difficult conditions before moving to Chateau Thierry where they met
the enemy again.
I lived for three days in a 50-foot dugout. I had 8 radio stations working all in
dugouts. The antennae were shot down
several times but we did not have a casual and maintained good communication
all the time. After the attack we were
hurried to the Chateau Thierry front where we made contact with the enemy on
the 29th of July and drove him back about 15 kilometers. [v]
During the war, Captain Marvel was on
the cutting edge of research into outfitting airplanes with wireless
communications equipment.
I have been experimenting with wireless telephones on the
ships (aeroplanes) and will soon have a flight (7 ships) equipped. We have tried out many kinds of wireless sets
on the ships, some very good and some not so good. We were just starting to equip the planes
with wireless telephones as the end came.[vi]
Due to the end of the War, Captain
Marvel narrowly avoided a promotion that would likely have changed obviated the
writing of this piece one hundred years later – Major Marvel wouldn’t have had
the same cachet. The letter recommending
his promotion recounted some of his accomplishments.
From: Chief Air Service, Army Group.
To: General George S. Gibbs, Signal Corps.
Subject: Promotion of Captain Orin E. Marvel, to the rank of
Major.
1. . . . This officer has handled liaison, consisting of
telephone, telegraph and radio for the air force which acted with the first
Army during the St. Michel and Argonne operations.
2. Captain Marvel proved to be one of our greatest assets by
his steady and uninterrupted supervision of our liaison system, without which
we would have been unable to function efficiently.[vii]
With the war over, the Army put
Captain Marvel’s super-powers to work on the Air Service Artillery Radio Board,
continuing the experiments in aviation communications he had begun during the
war.[viii] In June 1919, Captain Marvel took part in an
early demonstration of airborne radio communication.
Lieutenant Bernard J. Tooher, pilot, and Captain Orin E.
Marvel, radio officer at Camp Vail, using a Curtiss H. plane, made a flight
over Fort Hancock and from an altitude of 2,000 feet communicated with their
control station by wireless. Continuing
10 miles out to sea they picked up wireless communication with a
dirigible. The duration of their flight
was 50 minutes.[ix]
Captain Marvel’s work improving
aviation telecommunications earned him at least two more patents. One for those throat-mounted microphones everyone
has seen strapped around the necks of pilots in the old war movies.
An object of this invention is to provide a transmitter for
electrical reception which is uninfluenced by the passage of strong wind and
inert toward noises extraneous of the sounds or speech transmitted.
. . . In the preferred form of my invention the transmitter
is adapted to be positioned at the throat of the operator and is constructed
and arranged to permit proper body movement of the operator incident to driving
or operating airplanes, automobiles or the like, and to be sealed automatically
against the high wind current and against the reception of influence of
extraneous noises. . . .
Another one was for one of the
earliest altimeters, and also included an audible low-altitude warning signal
for landing in low-visibility conditions.
With the war over, and his work with
the military complete, Orin Marvel turned his super-powers to civilian radio
reception. But despite his new status as
a civilian, he retained “Captain” as an honorific title throughout the rest of his
life.
During the 1920s, Captain Marvel
teamed up with Charles F. Kettering in the DAY-FAN radio company. Marvel was in good company at DAY-FAN;
Charles Kettering had made significant contributions to the early days of NCR,
founded DELCO and would later head up the General Motor’s Research Corporation
for nearly thirty years. His name is
perhaps best-known today from the Sloane-Kettering Cancer Center. One of Marvel’s successes at DAY-FAN was to
create an alternating-current power supply for home radio receivers, so that
they could be plugged into an outlet without the need for what was at the time,
more cumbersome, expensive and less powerful batteries.
Captain Marvel may have had super-powers,
but he was only human. His first wife
died in 1926 after nearly twenty years of marriage. When he remarried in 1934, an ex-girlfriend sued
him for $75,000 for breach of promise, a high price-tag that put the otherwise
personal difficulty into the national news.
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The Evening Sun (Baltimore, Maryland), June 28, 1934, page 1.
|
In the 1930s, Captain Marvel
pioneered another field of technology, audiometry, developing audiometers,
audiograms and hearing aids for the Sonotone Corporation.
Capt. O. E. Marvel, who played a part in establishing the
first unit of sound measurement while affiliated with the United States Bureau
of Standards, has developed what he calls an “ear gymnasium” for the correction of deafness.
Its purpose is to exercise the ear drum and train it to
register sound. The contrivance combines
the principles of radio, phonograph and telephone.
The Morning News (Wilmington, Delaware), March 11, 1933, page 13.
Capt. O. E. Marvel of the audiometer division of the Sonotone
Corp. will be at the Eau Claire Hotel on Tuesday, Oct. 25th . . .
for the purpose of making audiometric tests and audiograms of hearing losses.
Leader-Telegram
(Eau Claire, Wisconsin), October 25, 1938, page 6.
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Life Magazine,
September 3, 1940, page 15.
|
But sadly, with his personal life
apparently back on track and a new career attracting national attention, Captain
Marvel passed away a few short months after his picture appeared in Life Magazine.
White Plains, N. Y., March 3 (AP) – Capt. O. E. Marvel, U. S.
A. (retired), who organized the radio and telephone system of the United States
Army Air Corps in France during the World War, died at a hospital here
Saturday.
Captain Marvel, 55, took part in the battles of St. Mihiel
and the Meuse-Argonne and was cited for distinguished service. After the war, working at McCook Air Field,
Dayton, Ohio, he developed one of the earliest airplane altimeters. Recently he had been engaged in the manufacture
of electrical hearing equipment.
The Baltimore Sun, March 4, 1941, page 11.
It’s not quite as glamorous as the
fictional “Captain Marvel” saving the Skrulls from the Krees, or something like
that (was I supposed to say “spoiler alert!”), but the real Captain Marvel’s contributions
to aviation and audiometrics may have helped save the world twice and may have saved
your hearing.
More Captains Marvel
While Captain Orin E. Marvel may be
the best-known of the real Captains Marvel, he was not the only one. In 1972, a young Air Force Academy grad named William Marvel
celebrated his promotion to Captain by donning a non-regulation uniform, and posing with the blonde and brunette stewardess friends who made the uniform in a scene seemingly taken straight out of Three’s
Company (did Mr. Roper take the picture?).
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The Daily News (Lebanon,
Pennsylvania), June 7, 1972, page 28.
|
Three years later, a reporter from
the Los Angeles Times tracked him down to see how it felt being the real Captain
Marvel. Apart from than the occasional “Shazam!”
reflexively screeched at him over the phone after announcing his name, he said it
wasn’t such a big deal. A comic book
company had asked him to do some promotional work after seeing his picture in
the paper, but the military said no. And
in any case, he wasn’t the only Captain Marvel in the Air force. Shortly after his promotion, he received a
letter from a Captain Marvel in Germany informing him that there were at least five
Captains Marvel in the Air Force at the time.[x]
He may not have been the only one,
but he had the coolest uniform.
[i] The Bronson Pilot (Bronson, Kansas),
August 8, 1907, page 8 (“Orin Marvel has been putting in new phones and doing
other work for the Mutual company . . . .”
[ii] “Who
Was the Real Captain Marvel,” hearinghealthmatters.org, December 26, 2017
(In my defense at the inevitable copyright infringement case, I wrote my post
on the “Real Captain America” and had already begun researching my post on the
“Real Captain Marvel” before running across this excellent piece – sometimes
great minds do think alike).
[iii] The Bronson Pilot, February 6, 1914,
page 8 (“Orin was recently granted a patent on a device for measuring and
filling transmitter buttons, which has been accepted by the Western Electric
Company”). I have been unable to track
down this patent.
[iv] The Service of the Missouri National Guard
on the Mexican Border, Jefferson City, The Hugh Stephens Co., 1919, page
459; Bronson Pilot, October 20, 1916,
page 4 (“. . . he had been promoted to first lieutenant, skipping second
lieutenant, and that he is in Kansas City as a recruiting officer.).
[v] A
letter home, published in the Bronson
Pilot, December 25, 1918, page 1.
[vi]
Ibid.
[vii]
Ibid.
[viii]
Army and Navy Journal, December 13,
1919, page 455.
[ix] Army and Navy Register, June 14, 1919,
page 766.
[x] Los Angeles Times, December 22, 1975,
page 33.
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