The Airplane - Jay Spenser [12]
Alphonse Pénaud.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Sadly, Pénaud’s spirits failed him. Wearied by chronic infirmity and despondent over the growing certainty he would not see his airplane built, he placed its lovingly drawn plans in a miniature wooden coffin and delivered them to fellow aerial researcher Louis Giffard. Following this bizarre gesture, he returned home and committed suicide at age thirty.
The year was 1880. By then, two growing boys called Wilbur and Orville had worn out their first Pénaud “bat.”
Casting about for fun, the young Wrights decided to build more Pénaud helicopters to the same formula. They made these next ones bigger, gleefully anticipating dramatic results. Instead they learned a lesson in physics. As Orville put it:
To our astonishment, we found that the larger the bat, the less it flew. We did not know that a machine having only twice the linear dimensions of another would require eight times the power. We finally became discouraged and returned to kite flying, a sport to which we had devoted so much attention that we were regarded as experts.6
Experimentation was already revealing to the Wrights immutable laws of the natural world. In this case, it was the lesson that mass is volumetric.
By way of example, consider two cubical blocks of quarried stone, one twice as large in any linear dimension as the other. If the first block is 1 meter long, wide, and high, its volume is 1 cubic meter (1 × 1 × 1). In turn, the second block, measuring 2 meters on a side, would have a volume of 8 cubic meters (2 × 2 × 2).
Yes, it would take eight 1-meter stone blocks to fill the same space occupied by a single 2-meter block. This explains the exponential weight increase with volume and the requirement for eight times as much power for twice the linear dimension. It is why man-carrying airplanes cannot fly with braided rubber bands, and why we need never fear the giant insects of vintage sci-fi movies: they would not be able to walk or fly.
Of course, this scale effect greatly complicated life for would-be airplane inventors.
Because Milton Wright’s work required periodic moves, Wilbur Wright had been born in Millville, Indiana. After he came along, their father relocated the family to Dayton, where Orville was born. A growing urban center at the confluence of several rivers in southwestern Ohio, Dayton was a picturesque cultural crossroads that offered a wonderful quality of life. Although Milton’s postings saw the family move again from time to time, they considered Dayton their home and returned there once and for all in 1884.
“If I were giving a young man advice as to how he might succeed in life,” Wilbur would say with dry humor, “I would say to him, pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio.”7
It was indeed a good life in the Wrights’ big frame house. “No family ever had a happier childhood than ours,” Katharine Wright, the youngest sibling, later said. “I was always in a hurry to get home after I had been away half a day.”8 Inside the tight-knit group, Wilbur was called Will, Orville was Orv, and Katharine Kate.
To this day the Wright brothers remain Dayton’s most celebrated sons. Of the two, Wilbur was the more cerebral and introspective. Tall, lean, and blue-eyed, he looked ascetic but was in fact vigorously athletic. With his clear intellect and exceptional memory, he stood out as the most accomplished of the five siblings.
Orville