The Airplane - Jay Spenser [17]
Wilbur and Orville worked under a different mind-set. They too had seen Henson’s artwork, but it didn’t sing to them because they were bicyclists. Their intimate association with this vehicle, its operation, and its manufacture led them to approach flight development in a different way than their European counterparts.
Wilbur and Orville were not in the least scared of tilting to one side or the other in flight. Banking in flight seemed natural to them because a bicyclist leans into turns. What’s more, they understood from the outset that the airplane needed to be controllable around all three axes and that the pilot had to be intimately involved with this process while aloft. These two insights were intuitive because the bicyclist must constantly direct his two-wheeled vehicle by means of a combination of active balance and coordinated use of handlebars, acceleration, and braking. If the bicyclist doesn’t stay on top of these things every minute, he’s in for a spill.
Today everybody understands that an airplane must tilt to turn. It seems funny to think anyone ever thought otherwise. But on the eve of the twentieth century, people simply did not know. Although bird flight certainly suggested the truth, wrong paradigms—such as Henson’s idée fixe of an aerial carriage—have tremendous power to blind people to the obvious.
3 CONFIGURATION
SHAPES AND IDEAS
There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.
—HIPPOCRATES (460–377 BCE)
Configuration was the first great challenge for aviation’s inventors. After all, they couldn’t very well build their flying machines until they had decided how to lay them out.
But what form should the airplane’s fuselage, or body, take? And where along this fuselage should the wings, engine, control surfaces, cockpit, and landing gear be mounted? How many wings should there be? If more than one on each side, should these lifting surfaces be mounted one above the other or in a tandem layout with one behind the next?
From our vantage point more than a century later, it seems strange that configuration was a challenge at all, let alone a vexing one. However, we benefit from hindsight. Aviation is such a part of our modern world that all of us—nervous fliers, Luddites, and small children included—pretty much know what an airplane looks like and where its parts should go.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, in contrast, there were no airplanes buzzing about overhead to provide answers. So what did people start with? For one thing, the Henson Aerial Steam Carriage; from the mid-nineteenth century onward, William Henson’s artwork rode the skies of our collective imagination like Valkyries sliding on wires across the stage of a Wagnerian opera. The Aerial Steam Carriage audaciously suggested that airplanes—like ships, carriages, and trains—would soon be a useful mode of transport.
Seeing those widely reproduced illustrations prompted flight’s pioneers to redouble their efforts. But even as they took heart, they dismissed the Aerial Steam Carriage’s technical details as mere futuristic imaginings. Here was artistic license, they believed, not practical guidance.
That was a shame because the Aerial Steam Carriage was not entirely a flight of fancy. Backed by George Cayley’s towering genius, Henson’s elaborate design offered configuration help on a platter. People could have spared themselves a lot of time and grief if they had only realized it.
As 1871 drew to a close, a disastrous war launched by France on Prussia culminated at the gates of Paris. German soldiers manned fortifications, shots rang out over barricades, and cannons crumped in hostilities that would leave the City of Light more heavily damaged than it would be in both of the coming century’s world wars put together.
Although the French would lose the Franco-Prussian War, their resourcefulness under fire at least gave the world its