The Airplane - Jay Spenser [0]
How Ideas Gave Us Wings
Jay Spenser
To Donald S. Lopez, 1923–2008
Contents
Introduction
1 Conception: The Thinker and the Dreamer
2 Birth: Wilbur, Orville, and the World
3 Configuration: Shapes and Ideas
4 Fuselage: Of Drums and Dragonflies
5 Wings, Part I: From Box Kites to Bridges
6 Wings, Part II: Cloud-Cutting Cantilevers
7 Empennage: Whale Flukes and Arrow Feathers
8 Flight Controls: The Chariot’s Reins
9 Flight Deck: Cockpits for Aerial Ships
10 Aero Propulsion: Prometheus Is Pushing
11 Landing Gear: Shoes, Canoes, and Carriage Wheels
12 Passenger Cabin: Voyaging Aloft
13 Systems Integration: Making Flying Safer
14 Today’s State of the Art: The Boeing Dreamliner
Postscript Tomorrow’s Wings: Future Air Travel Technologies
Notes
Acknowledgments
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
THE QUEST FOR WINGS—HUMANKIND’S OLDEST DREAM
In New Hampshire one morning when I was seven years old, I awoke and found I could fly. Concentrating hard, I levitated off the floor, flew downstairs, rounded a tight corner, and soared across the living room of my grandparents’ farmhouse without ever touching down.
It was a dream, of course, but it thrilled me, and decades later the lingering memory remains vivid. It turns out that I’m not alone; at one time or another in our lives, most of us have fantasized about flying.
Flying is humankind’s oldest dream. Ever since our earliest ancestors first gazed skyward, we human beings have envied the birds their ability to slip gravity’s bonds. The result is a pan-cultural longing for wings so deeply rooted in our psyche that it sings to our soul and is perennially our favorite metaphor for freedom.
The power of flight’s siren call is difficult to overstate. Eons before a Hellenistic sculptor crafted the Nike of Samothrace—antiquity’s great expression of this wish—flying was already a favored theme of artists and storytellers. From the dawn of history, it has colored our myths and our magical thinking. In religions, the ability to fly is universally equated with the divine.
As human technological prowess advanced, this yearning escalated into a focused quest for wings that ultimately succeeded because of people like you and me—dreamers all, and all mere mortals of flesh and blood. It is to their vision, ingenuity, collaboration, and sacrifice that we owe the modern wonder of air travel.
Inventing the airplane is one of history’s greatest adventures, yet books about flight seldom do the subject justice. Too often they fail to evoke the underlying wonder of the subject matter. Worse still, air travel itself is often little fun these days. Long lines at airport security checkpoints, crowded flights, and today’s lack of in-flight service and amenities have squeezed the glamour out of what should by all rights be an exciting adventure.
As for the jetliners themselves, we take them for granted. Whether we as individuals love to fly or dread it, we tend to view the airliners we board as strictly a conveyance—glorified buses with wings—and thus fail to see them for what they really are: an invention bequeathing a degree of mobility utterly inconceivable through the vast majority of human existence.
But what if we could see the jetliner with fresh eyes? Better still, what if we could understand the great ideas in history that laid its keel and sent it soaring high into the blue? Best of all, what if we could stand elbow to elbow with flight’s pioneers and share vicariously in those “aha” moments when they solved aviation’s technical challenges? Then flying would be an adventure again.
In this new century marked by profound global challenges, may this book remind us what we humans can do when we share a grand vision and collaborate to see it achieved.
JAY SPENSER
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
MARCH 2008
1 CONCEPTION
THE THINKER AND THE DREAMER
An uninterrupted navigable ocean that comes to the threshold of every man’s door ought not to be neglected as a source of human gratification and advantage.