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Richard, I found the article of Peter M. Grosz in WW1 Aero No. 172 (May 2001) pp. 27-31, titled 'Otto Fritzsche and the first aircraft of the German Navy'.
Oberleutnant zur See Otto Fritzsche (1882-1908) started with the design of a flying machine in 1906 when he had enough cash in hand after the death of his father. The machine was the 3-winged tractor plane seen in Jane's for instance, this is the best known picture of the Fritzsche 3-wing machine.
The machine was designed aling his lines by Ing. Mordhost in Kiel who was also the owner of a machine factory. The engine was also designed and built by Mordhost, but was a failure. The idea was to make an 'all-German' machine.
The famous picture shows the machine without engine and with a mock-up four-bladed propeller.
Otto Fritzsche was killed in a motor incident on June 4, 1908 leaving his then unfinished project unattended. But the project was taken over by the brother of Otto, Karl Fritzsche who assigned the design responsability to Marine-Ober-Ingenieur Karl Loew (who was already involved from the beginning).
The unfinished Fritzsche 3-wing machine was exhibited on the Sportfest of the Kieler Verkehrsverein in July 1908. No pictures are shown of this event, but they may exist somewhere in reports (newspapers) on the event.
In 1908 Loew was transferred to a sea command, bringing progress on the building of the Fritzsche machine to a grinding halt. Work was resumed in late 1909 when Loew brought the Fritzsche machine to the (then starting) Rumpler factory in Berlin for completion. [There is a hazy picture of the machine in the Rumpler factory with Diplom-Ingenieur Rösner].
The original Fritzsche machine was completed and assembled by Rumpler with Rösner in attendence. A 50 hp Rumpler Aeolus V-8 engine was fitted. The machine made quite a stir at Rumpler as they had only seen the structural details of Wright, Voisin etc. on pictures. Now they could see an aeroplane in the flesh.
It appears that Loew was given leave to test the machine on Johannisthal in mid-1910, but flight was not succesfull (undercarriage failure, engine problems etc.). Loew was injured and the machine never flew again.
New effort was to get rid of the three-wing tandem configuration. In the end Loew re-used parts of the Fritzsche three-wing machine for building a 'normal' Taube, which was named the Fritzsche Taube, still in honour of the original instigator of it all Otto Fritzsche.
That socalled Fritzsche Taube was later fitted with floats, becoming Eindecker 1 (E 1) in the naval inventory.
As I see it the different sources have all somewhat from the cake but not the whole story.
There is no documented relation with the three-wing tandem Farman design (built by Voisin, but never finished). The machine looks superfically the same, but in details there are all sort of differences.
Cheers
Kees
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