The Airplane - Jay Spenser [16]
Consequently, there is little if anything uniquely American about the Wright Flyer or its development. And much as the Wrights loved their hometown, the same goes for Dayton because many other places in the world offered a similar combination of intellectual openness and supportive light industry. In fact, the airplane might just as well have been invented in Manchester, Munich, Perth, Rio de Janeiro, or Toronto.
But it wasn’t. It was invented in the United States. The reason was the bicycle.
The invention of the airplane was a battleground for two warring paradigms about what the airplane would be like. Paradigms are mind-sets created by what we think we know. Depending on how closely they match the actuality, these mental models either can help us succeed or can place blinders over our eyes that keep us from perceiving what we later realize was obvious all along.
Working under the right paradigm helped Orville and Wilbur to succeed even as a wrong one sabotaged the hopes of Europe’s many experimenters. But for this situation, the French—who felt they had invented flight because of the success of the Montgolfiers in 1783—might well have been first. If so, the airplane, like the automobile before it, would have been a European invention.
What led Europe’s aerial experimenters down the garden path? Ironically, it was William Samuel Henson, Cayley’s eager disciple. Or more accurately, it was the powerful sway of Henson’s persuasive vision of what aviation would be.
First published in the early 1840s, the engraved illustrations of the Henson Aerial Steam Carriage continued to appear off and on in newspapers, magazines, and books for more than a half century. More thrilling artwork of heavier-than-air flying machines was hard to imagine, and the very sight of this aerial stagecoach spurred Europe’s aerial experimenters to redouble their efforts. Unfortunately, however, it also handed them a lot of incorrect notions.
The concept of an aerial carriage brought with it a concomitant expectation that people would drive airplanes around the sky making flat turns as they did in horse-drawn vehicles. This unquestioned assumption shaped how France’s early experimenters approached airplane design, and it cost them dearly.
Part of Henson’s paradigm worked. For example, airplanes would indeed pitch their noses up or down to climb or descend. This was intuitive because horse-drawn carriages do just that when traversing hilly countryside. But carriages don’t tilt sideways, or at least not very far, because that leads to a catastrophic upset.
Henson’s vision told Europe’s early experimenters that their airplanes must not be permitted to tilt side to side or else catastrophe would ensue. To ensure that this never happened, some experimenters used strongly upward-angled wings (Cayley’s idea of dihedral) so that the airplane would be self-righting in flight. Others placed vertical fore-and-aft fabric panels between the wings of their biplanes to prevent sideslips. Both these features suggest that Europe’s pioneers were terrified of banking, or dropping a wing in flight.
Another place where Henson’s Aerial Steam Carriage paradigm misled people was the vital issue of controllability. Controlling horse-drawn vehicles does not require constant active involvement on the driver’s part. The horses are set in motion and the reins are not used again until the horses needed further instruction, whether it is to speed up, slow down, change direction, or stop.
Consequently, Europe’s “early birds” were remarkably cavalier about controllability. To them, all one needed to do was create an inherently stable craft whose wings never dropped to either side. After nosing this vehicle aloft, one would simply “drive” it around the sky.
A wealthy Brazilian named Alberto Santos-Dumont performed Europe’s first heavier-than-air flights late in 1906. His 14-bis, a marginal aircraft, was largely uncontrollable, but that didn’t bother him; his goal was simply to get into the air. This disregard for a key requirement of flight was