The experiments with working models, which led to the successful flights, were commenced in 1887, and it has seemed to me preferable to put them at first in chronological order, and to present to the reader what may seem instructive in their history, while not withholding from him the mistaken efforts which were necessarily made before the better path was found. In this same connection, I may say that I have no professional acquaintance with steam engineering, as will, indeed, be apparent from the present record, but it may be observed that none of the counsel which I obtained from those possessing more knowledge was useful in meeting the special problems which presented themselves to me, and which were solved, as far as they have been solved, by constant “trial and error.”
I shall, then, as far as practicable, follow the order of dates in presenting the work that has been done, but the reader will observe that after the preliminary investigations and since the close of 1893, at least four or five independent investigations, attended with constant experiment and radically distinct kinds of construction, have been going on simultaneously. We have, for instance, the work in the shop, which is of two essentially different kinds: first, that on the frames and engines, which finally led to the construction of an engine of unprecedented lightness; second, the experimental construction of the supporting and guiding surfaces, which has involved an entirely different set of considerations, concerned with equilibrium and support in flight. These constructions, however successful, are confined to the shop and are, as will be seen later, useless without a launching apparatus. The construction of a suitable launching apparatus itself involved difficulties which took years to overcome. And, finally, the whole had to be tested by actual flights in free air, which were conducted at a place some 30 miles distant from the shop where the original construction went on. [p006]
Simultaneously with these, original experiments with the whirling-table were being conducted along lines of research, which though necessary have only been indicated. We have, then, at least five subjects, so distinct that they can only be properly treated separately, and accordingly they will be found in Chapters VII, VIII, IX and X, [◊] and in Part Third [in preparation].
It is inevitable that in so complex a study some repetition should present itself, especially in the narrative form chosen as the best method of presenting the subject to the reader. Each of these chapters, then, will contain its own historical account of its own theme, so that each subject can be pursued continuously in the order of its actual development, while, since they were all interdependent and were actually going on simultaneously, the order of dates which is followed in each chapter will be a simple and sufficient method of reference from one to the other.
EXPERIMENTS WITH SMALL MODELS
In order to understand how the need arises for such experiments in fixing conditions which it might appear were already determined in the work “Experiments in Aerodynamics,”[8] it is to be constantly borne in mind, as a consideration of the first importance, that the latter experiments, being conducted with the whirling-table, force the model to move in horizontal flight and at a constant angle. Now these are ideal conditions, as they avoid such practical difficulties as maintaining equilibrium and horizontality, and for this reason alone give results more favorable than are to be expected in free flight.
Besides this, the values given in “Aerodynamics” were obtained with rigid surfaces, and these surfaces themselves were small and therefore manageable, while larger surfaces, such as are used in actual flight, would need to be stiffened by guys and like means, which offer resistance to the air and still further reduce the results obtained. It is, therefore, fairly certain, that nothing like the lift of 200 pounds to the horse-power for a rate of 40 miles an hour,[9] obtained under these ideal conditions with the whirling-table, will be obtained in actual flight, at least with plane wings.
The data in “Aerodynamics” were, then, insufficient to determine the conditions of free flight, not alone because the apparatus compels the planes to move in horizontal flight, but because other ideally perfect conditions are obtained by surfaces rigidly attached to the whirling-table so as to present an angle to the wind of advance which is invariable during the course of the experiment, whereas the surfaces employed in actual flight may evidently change this angle and cause [p007] the aerodrome to move upward or downward, and thus depart from horizontal flight so widely as to bring prompt destruction.
To secure this balance, or equilibrium, we know in theory, that the center of gravity must be brought nearly under the center of pressure, by which latter expression we mean the resultant of all the forces which tend to sustain the aerodrome; but this center of pressure, as may in fact be inferred from “Aerodynamics,”[10] varies with the inclination of the surface. It varies also with the nature of the surface itself, and for one and the same surface is constantly shifted unless the whole be rigidly held, as it is on the whirling-table, and as it cannot be in free flight.
Here, then, are conditions of the utmost importance, our knowledge of which, as derived from ordinary aerodynamic experiments, is almost nothing. A consideration of this led me to remark in the conclusion of “Aerodynamics”: