Waldo Dean Waterman was an inventor and aviation pioneer from San Diego

San Diego, California

San Diego is the eighth-largest city in the United States and second-largest city in California. The city is located on the coast of the Pacific Ocean in Southern California, immediately adjacent to the Mexican border. The birthplace of California, San Diego is known for its mild year-round...

, California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

. His most notable contributions to aviation
were the first tailless monoplane

Monoplane

A monoplane is a fixed-wing aircraft with one main set of wing surfaces, in contrast to a biplane or triplane. Since the late 1930s it has been the most common form for a fixed wing aircraft.-Types of monoplane:...

 (the precursor to the flying wing

Flying wing

A flying wing is a tailless fixed-wing aircraft which has no definite fuselage, with most of the crew, payload and equipment being housed inside the main wing structure....

), the first aircraft with modern tricycle landing gear and the first successful low cost and simple to fly flying car

Flying car

A flying car or roadable aircraft is an aircraft that can also travel along roads. All the working examples have required some manual or automated process of conversion between the two modes of operation....

 which in the 1930s were commonly called Flivver Aircraft.

Waterman built his first aircraft, a biplane hang glider, in 1909 while still in high school.