When Joseph Terleph (he used the easier name "Terle" for business purposes) who had not yet flown a plane took his completed craft to Roosevelt Field on Long Island to taxi it, and then had it taken aloft by a famous if reckless barnstorming pilot to be rigorously and successfully tested and found airworthy, it proved to be at the time, not only unusual, but sensational.

Joseph Terleph (1900–82) was one of those technically gifted people, who as was the case for many in previous generations, had his education cut short by lack of opportunity and bad luck.

Terle obtained a first-grade commercial radio operator's license in his mid-teens, and on the strength of that, at the tail end of World War I, he was allowed to enlist in the Navy at the age of eighteen with the rank of a second-class petty officer.

Despite the loss of his business, during the whole of the depression, he managed to work as a printer in a plant maintained by a department store for its own advertising so that he and his family did not have to endure the kind of privations that he had experienced in his youth.

It was around this time that Terle, lacking the necessary social and financial resources, not long married and with a young daughter, yet having faith in his own technical talent, decided to build his own plane.

As he described it in his autobiographical notes, one night after work in the printing plant, he was relaxing reading a magazine when he came upon an ad for a book called "The Sport Plane Constructor."

As an extra, the author offered to sell a jig, or wooden form for holding the various pieces of a wing rib for gluing and nailing.

Since the wing and fuselage were made of wood, Terle also discovered he would need both a circular and jig saw to fabricate the various pieces, so he bought those also.

Terle went on to purchase additional material as necessary for the plane's construction from a business called Air Associates located at Roosevelt Field farther out on Long Island.

In general, almost all the parts of the plane (excluding the engine of course) he made by hand, despite his not having previously worked as a machinist or with machine tools.

During the assembly, Terle held the various pieces in the jig, slid the ribs onto spars for each wing section, and braced them with piano wire that he tightened with turnbuckles.

To mount the wing precisely in the correct position for the plane's balance he placed a 170-pound weight in the cockpit to substitute for a pilot, and the tanks filled with gas and oil.

A pilot named Randy Enslow, who was well known at the time, was impressed by the smooth-running engine and volunteered to take the craft aloft for Terle.

[3][circular reference] His pilot's license was suspended for flying under a bridge, stunting, failing to pay the resulting fines and an accumulation of other violations.

system called out, “It’s not every day you can see Bert Acosta give an exhibition like this.” According to the New York Herald-Tribune on the scene, about 5000 people turned their attention to the tiny gyrating aircraft.

After an hour, Acosta landed and congratulated Terle, saying (perhaps exaggerating a little), “I like it better than any airplane I ever flew.” The Herald-Tribune report was picked up by newspapers and magazines around the country, and so much publicity resulted from the flight that plans were made to put the craft into production.

At the outset of World War II, he left printing to work for the next forty years as a Senior Laboratory Technician in defense industries where he designed and built various prototype electronic, mechanical and Electro-Optical devices.

Bert Acosta's heavy drinking continued to take its toll on him, and in the years after his return from Spain in the 1930s after flying combat missions for the Royalist side, he gradually sank into obscurity.