The Airplane - Jay Spenser [21]
Until late 1908, just the Wright 1903 Flyer and its immediate descendents qualified as airplanes. Nevertheless, confusion over this invention’s definition, and the delay in understanding what had occurred in North America, led Europe to falsely claim primacy in heavier-than-air flight.
On October 23, 1906, at Paris’ Bagatelle cavalry grounds, Alberto Santos-Dumont climbed into an odd-looking biplane called the 14-bis and opened the throttle of its 25-hp Antoinette engine. Breaking free of the ground, he sailed 160 feet (50 meters) before settling back to earth. The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, which officially witnessed the feat, wrongly proclaimed it the world’s first certified airplane flight.
Photographs of Santos-Dumont’s machine in the air were greeted with rapturous enthusiasm. The pan-continental celebration was premature, however, because the 14-bis was, in fact, not an airplane. Incapable of controlled or sustained flight, this machine had biplane wings that angled strongly upward just past the propeller. Beyond the engine was a wicker basket for the pilot and a fuselage culminating in a box-like surface that tilted side to side or up and down for some measure of control.
Alberto Santos-Dumont.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
What’s funny about the 14-bis is that the propeller was at the rear and what looked like the tail was actually its front. Sitting on the ground, it looked like it should go in one direction when in fact Santos-Dumont intended it to go in the other. This backward layout gave aviation the term canard for an airplane with the main wings toward the rear, like a duck or a goose, and smaller lifting surfaces near the front.
The Santos-Dumont 14-bis performed Europe’s first flight by a heavier-than-air vehicle in October 1906.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
The 14-bis was entirely the brainchild of Santos-Dumont, a diminutive man in his thirties whose limpid brown eyes, trim moustache, and air of icy aplomb won French hearts. Heir to a South American coffee fortune, Santos-Dumont had the leisure time and resources to indulge his lifelong fascination with flight. He had already made a name for himself with small dirigibles before turning to heavier-than-air experimentation in 1906.
If Alberto Santos-Dumont came up short in scientific insight, it was entirely forgivable. Nobody yet had much of that on the European side of the Atlantic Ocean. His 14-bis—which resembled nothing so much as a collision of Hargrave box kites—staggered into the air eight more times, the longest being a twenty-one-second wallow in ground effect.
A technological dead end, the 14-bis influenced no one else. Its odd configuration quickly disappeared from the scene, but not so Santos-Dumont himself. He returned to prominence in 1909 with the tiny Demoiselle, one of early aviation’s most delightful successes.
Other European designs were more promising but failed to fly for one reason or another. One was by Trajan Vuia, a Hungarian-trained Romanian whose fascination with flight brought him to Paris. Vuia created a Cayley-style monoplane in 1906 that, although unable to fly, presciently anticipated the modern configuration. The following year, Louis Blériot unveiled his surprisingly modern Model VII, a low-wing monoplane with a fully enclosed fuselage except for its cockpit. Although it too failed to perform, its look of evident rightness made it influential.
Romanian Trajan Vuia with his unsuccessful monoplane of 1906.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Even so, confusion reigned for years as to what form the airplane should take. In March 1910, another oddball flying machine made history’s first successful takeoff and landing on water. Designed, built, and flown by French maritime engineer Henri Fabre on the Mediterranean coast near Marseilles, the world’s first hydroaeroplane was in fact not a true airplane at all because, like the 14-bis, it could only perform short, straight-ahead hops.