Every-day Science: Volume 7. The Conquest of Time and Space

by Henry Smith Williams; Edward Huntington Williams

"The rudder is of a shape very unlike that of a ship, for it is adapted both for vertical and horizontal steering. The width of the wings from tip to tip is between twelve and thirteen feet, and the length of the whole about sixteen feet. The weight is nearly thirty pounds, of which about one-fourth is contained in the machinery. The engine and boilers are constructed with an almost single eye to economy of weight, not of force, and are very wasteful of steam, of which they spend their own weight in five minutes. This steam might all be recondensed and the water re-used by proper condensing apparatus, but this cannot be easily introduced in so small a scale of construction. With it the time of flight might be hours instead of minutes, but without it the flight (of the present aerodrome) is limited to about five minutes, though in that time, as will be seen presently, it can go some miles; but owing to the danger of its leaving the surface of the water for that of the land, and wrecking itself on shore, the time of flight is limited designedly to less than two minutes."

When this flying-machine was put to the actual test its performance justified the most sanguine expectations; it actually flew as no other machine had ever flown before. A number of men of science watched this remarkable performance, among others Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, who reported it to the Institute of France. "Through the courtesy of Mr. S. P. Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, I have had on various occasions the pleasure of witnessing his experiments with aerodromes," wrote Dr. Bell, "and especially the remarkable success attained by him in his experiments made on the Potomac River on Wednesday, May 6th [which led me to urge him to make public some of these results].

"On the occasion referred to, the aerodrome, at a given signal, started from a platform about twenty feet above the water, and rose at first directly in the face of the wind, moving at all times with remarkable steadiness, and subsequently swinging around in large curves of, perhaps, a hundred yards in diameter, and continually ascending until its steam was exhausted, when at a lapse of about a minute and a half, and at a height which I judged to be between eighty and one hundred feet in the air, the wheels ceased turning, and the machine, deprived of the aid of propellers, to my surprise did not fall, but settled down so softly and gently that it touched the water without the least shock, and was in fact immediately ready for another trial."

To most persons, even to the cautious and scientific inventor himself, the performance of this, and a second aerodrome which flew about three-quarters of a mile, seemed to show that the secret of aerial navigation was all but fathomed. "The world, indeed, will be supine," Langley wrote a short time after the success of his flying-machine, "if it does not realize that a new possibility has come to it, and that the great universal highway overhead is soon to be opened." What could be plainer? A machine of a certain construction, weighing some thirty pounds, and carrying at that some excess of weight, had been able to fly a relatively long distance. What easier than to construct a machine on precisely similar lines only ten, a hundred, a thousand times larger, until it would carry persons and cargo, and fly across an ocean or a continent?

Professor Langley himself, as was most fitting, undertook the construction of such a man-carrying air-ship. And it was during this undertaking that he made the momentous discovery that seemed to oppose a question mark to the possibility of flight by the aeroplane principle. This discovery was an "unyielding mathematical law that the weight of such a machine increases as the cube of its dimensions, whereas the wing surface increases as the square." In other words, as the machine is made larger, the size of the wings must be increased in an alarmingly disproportionate ratio. And the best that Professor Langley's man-carrying flying-machine could do, after the inventor had expended the limit of his ingenuity, was to dive into the waters of Chesapeake Bay, instead of soaring through the air as its prototype, the aerodrome, had done.

THE IMPOSSIBLE ACCOMPLISHED

The plunge of Langley's aerodrome downward into the water instead of upward through space as had been confidently expected, carried with it the hopes of a great number of hitherto enthusiasts, who were now inclined to believe that the practical conquest of the air was almost as far beyond our reach as it had been beyond that of all preceding generations. Learned scientists were able to prove to their own satisfaction, by long columns of figures and elaborate mathematical calculations, that the air is unconquerable.

THE WRIGHT AEROPLANE.

The aeroplane is here shown at rest, facing the right. This is the original type of bi-plane flying machines, of which all the others are only modifications. The starting-rail along which the machine glides while acquiring momentum is seen at the right; the rope connecting it with the starting derrick, at the left. The sledge-like runners, intended to break the shock of alighting, are plainly shown. The parallel planes of canvas at the right are horizontal rudders to direct the machine upward or downward. The vertical planes at the left are active rudders to direct the machine laterally. The two paddle-like structures at the back of the machine are the wooden propellers, actuated (at a rate of from 1000 to 1400 revolutions per minute) by an oil motor. With a machine of this type the Wright brothers, of Dayton, Ohio, were the first to demonstrate the feasibility of aerial navigation with a heavier-than-air machine; and world-famous flights were made by Mr. Orville Wright at Washington and by Mr. Wilbur Wright in France in the summer of 1908.