The Airplane - Jay Spenser [2]
But there was more to this rampant “balloonacy” than poetic sensibilities. With the industrial revolution then under way in England and spreading to Europe, balloons also symbolized man’s growing technological prowess and the heady excitement of new frontiers. Balloons even became a favorite decorative motif in French furniture, plates, paintings, mantel clocks, and chandeliers.
Back in Yorkshire, the success of the Montgolfiers kindled in young George Cayley a lifelong fascination with flight. But the balloon itself didn’t hold the Yorkshire boy’s interest for very long. He quickly decided that heavier-than-air vehicles were flying’s future.
Two factors shaped this conviction. The first was Cayley’s belief that a flying machine, to be practical, must be dirigible (steerable) so people could fly it where they liked instead of drifting at the whim of the wind. The second was his delight in a flying toy perfected a year after that first balloon flight by two other Frenchmen, the naturalist Launoy and a mechanic named Bienvenu.
Launoy and Bienvenu’s toy was a rudimentary helicopter with a central shaft, corks at both ends with feathers angled to provide lift as they spun, and a bow (as in bow and arrow) drawn taut by winding its string around the shaft. Letting go the wound-up helicopter released the bow’s tension, rotating the feathered shaft to carry it high into the sky.
In his early twenties, Cayley built and tested a copy of this ingenious device, which for him was more than a mere amusement. In size and performance, it greatly improved on the Chinese top, that ancient and ubiquitous toy consisting of a carved propeller mounted atop a stick. Spinning this stick rapidly between one’s hands would send the Chinese top aloft.
Unlike balloons, man-made amusements such as these were not buoyant. Neither were birds, yet they too could fly. Such being the case, Cayley wondered, why couldn’t a man-carrying machine be built that likewise was heavier than the air around it?
To investigate this intriguing idea, Cayley created a laboratory-cum-workshop at Brompton Hall, his ancestral estate at Brompton-by-Sawdon, near Scarborough. There he built models that he dropped down the manor house’s stairwell in order to study their fall. His wife’s tolerance of these highly disruptive experiments unfortunately proved low, so he conducted them only when she was away.
By 1799, George Cayley’s pioneering efforts led him in his mid-twenties to an astonishing conceptual leap: the first scientifically grounded imagining of an airplane. That same year, the French Revolution drew to a close and Napoleon Bonaparte, the general who would be emperor, marched off to begin changing the face of Europe. George Washington died at his Virginia farm at age sixty-seven, the Rosetta Stone was discovered in Egypt, and Ludwig van Beethoven—not yet thirty and already going deaf—was at work on his first symphony.
On a silver disc dated 1799, Cayley inscribed a flying vehicle with an arched main wing, a single-seat gondola, and a tail resembling an arrow’s stabilizing feathers. Attached by a universal joint, this cruciform tail could tilt up, down, or side to side to alter the craft’s direction of flight.
The wing of this proto-airplane was a billowing fabric sail that Cayley apparently proposed with ease of construction in mind. Later in life in a second round of aeronautical experimentation, he would construct manned gliders with fabric wings.
The final feature of this crude etching reveals Cayley’s greatest realization. Aft of the wing are propulsive paddles worked like oars by the pilot in the cockpit. Cayley called these paddles propellers even though they moved fore and aft rather than rotating.
Cayley understood full well that this fanciful propulsion system would not work and that human muscle power alone would be inadequate to sustain flight. He included this representation of a rowing impetus only as a