A History of Aeronautics

by Evelyn Charles Vivian; W. Lockwood Marsh

In 1884 came the first patents of Horatio Phillips, whose work lay mainly in the direction of investigation into the curvature of plane surfaces, with a view to obtaining the greatest amount of support. Phillips was one of the first to treat the problem of curvature of planes as a matter for scientific experiment, and, great as has been the development of the driven plane in the 36 years that have passed since he began, there is still room for investigation into the subject which he studied so persistently and with such valuable result.

At this point it may be noted that, with the solitary exception of Le Bris, practically every student of flight had so far set about constructing the means of launching humanity into the air without any attempt at ascertaining the nature and peculiarities of the sustaining medium. The attitude of experimenters in general might be compared to that of a man who from boyhood had grown up away from open water, and, at the first sight of an expanse of water, set to work to construct a boat with a vague idea that, since wood would float, only sufficient power was required to make him an efficient navigator. Accident, perhaps, in the shape of lack of means of procuring driving power, drove Le Bris to the form of experiment which he actually carried out; it remained for the later years of the nineteenth century to produce men who were content to ascertain the nature of the support the air would afford before attempting to drive themselves through it.

Of the age in which these men lived and worked, giving their all in many cases to the science they loved, even to life itself, it may be said with truth that ‘there were giants on the earth in those days,’ as far as aeronautics is in question. It was an age of giants who lived and dared and died, venturing into uncharted space, knowing nothing of its dangers, giving, as a man gives to his mistress, without stint and for the joy of the giving. The science of to-day, compared with the glimmerings that were in that age of the giants, is a fixed and certain thing; the problems of to-day are minor problems, for the great major problem vanished in solution when the Wright Brothers made their first ascent. In that age of the giants was evolved the flying man, the new type in human species which found full expression and came to full development in the days of the war, achieving feats of daring and endurance which leave the commonplace landsman staggered at thought of that of which his fellows prove themselves capable. He is a new type, this flying man, a being of self-forgetfulness; of such was Lilienthal, of such was Pilcher; of such in later days were Farman, Bleriot, Hamel, Rolls, and their fellows; great names that will live for as long as man flies, adventurers equally with those of the spacious days of Elizabeth. To each of these came the call, and he worked and dared and passed, having, perhaps, advanced one little step in the long march that has led toward the perfecting of flight.

It is not yet twenty years since man first flew, but into that twenty years have been compressed a century or so of progress, while, in the two decades that preceded it, was compressed still more. We have only to recall and recount the work of four men: Lilienthal, Langley, Pilcher, and Clement Ader to see the immense stride that was made between the time when Penaud pulled a trigger for the last time and the Wright Brothers first left the earth. Into those two decades was compressed the investigation that meant knowledge of the qualities of the air, together with the development of the one prime mover that rendered flight a possibility—the internal combustion engine. The coming and progress of this latter is a thing apart, to be detailed separately; for the present we are concerned with the evolution of the driven plane, and with it the evolution of that daring being, the flying man. The two are inseparable, for the men gave themselves to their art; the story of Lilienthal’s life and death is the story of his work; the story of Pilcher’s work is that of his life and death.

Considering the flying man as he appeared in the war period, there entered into his composition a new element—patriotism—which brought about a modification of the type, or, perhaps, made it appear that certain men belonged to the type who in reality were commonplace mortals, animated, under normal conditions, by normal motives, but driven by the stress of the time to take rank with the last expression of human energy, the flying type. However that may be, what may be termed the mathematising of aeronautics has rendered the type itself evanescent; your pilot of to-day knows his craft, once he is trained, much in the manner that a driver of a motor-lorry knows his vehicle; design has been systematised, capabilities have been tabulated; camber, dihedral angle, aspect ratio, engine power, and plane surface, are business items of drawing office and machine shop; there is room for enterprise, for genius, and for skill; once and again there is room for daring, as in the first Atlantic flight. Yet that again was a thing of mathematical calculation and petrol storage, allied to a certain stark courage which may be found even in landsmen. For the ventures into the unknown, the limit of daring, the work for work’s sake, with the almost certainty that the final reward was death, we must look back to the age of the giants, the age when flying was not a business, but romance.

Lilienthal with his glider folded after a glide.

Lilienthal’s biplane glider alighting.