The flight by Mr. Wilbur Wright from the Statue of Liberty to the tomb of General Grant, in New York, 1909, and the exploits of his brother in the same year, when a new altitude record of 1600 feet was made and H.R.H. the Crown Prince of Germany was taken up as a passenger, are only specimens of the later work done by these pioneers in aerial navigation.
Like the Wrights, the Voisin firm from the beginning adhered firmly to the biplane type of machine. The sketch gives dimensions of one of the early cellular forms built for H. Farman (see illustration, page [147]). The metal screw makes about a thousand revolutions. The wings are of india rubber sheeting on an ash frame, the whole frame and car body being of wood, the latter covered with canvas and thirty inches wide by ten feet long. The engine weighed 175 pounds. The whole weight of this machine was nearly 1200 pounds; that built later for Delagrange was brought under a thousand pounds. The ratio of weight to main surface in the Farman aeroplane was about 2-3/4 to 1.
A modified cellular biplane also built for Farman had a main wing area of 560 square feet, the planes being seventy-nine inches wide and only fifty-nine inches apart. The tail was an open box, seventy-nine inches wide and of about ten feet spread. The cellular partitions in this tail were pivoted along the vertical front edges so as to serve as steering rudders. The elevating rudder was in front. The total weight was about the same as that of the first machine and the usual speed twenty-eight miles per hour.
Voisin-Farman Biplane
Henry Farman has been flying publicly since 1907. He made the first circular flight of one kilometer, and attained a speed of about a mile a minute, in the year following. In 1909 he accomplished a trip of nearly 150 miles, remaining four hours in the air. Farman was probably the first man to ascend with two passengers.
The Champagne Grand Prize Won by Henry Farman
80 Kilometers in 3 hours