The Airplane - Jay Spenser [40]
Throughout those adventurous six years in his twenties, it was the birds that fascinated Hargrave the most. He loved their calls, their brilliant plumage, the way they rode the air. Because if there was one thing he believed, it was that human beings would soon teach themselves to fly.
Returning to Sydney, Lawrence Hargrave settled down, married, and started a family. His fascination with the natural world led him to the Royal Society of New South Wales and duties as an assistant astronomer with the Sydney Observatory. But his thoughts were never far from flight, and when his father died some years later, leaving him with independent means, he left that post to devote himself full-time to aeronautical studies.
Hargrave began by observing birds and soon progressed to experimenting with model gliders and kites. To this end, he moved his growing family to Stanwell Park, a coastal community south of Sydney that offered steep slopes, a sandy beach, and steady winds. Here Hargrave independently rediscovered what Cayley had learned eight decades before: curved surfaces, such as a bird’s wing, produce more aerodynamic lift than flat ones.
Lawrence Hargrave.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
In 1893, this continuing investigation culminated in Hargrave’s great gift to aviation: the box kite. This new type of kite lifted strongly, was very stable, and was structurally robust. In it Hargrave rightly perceived the basis for a man-carrying flying machine.
In November 1894, Hargrave ascended into the air beneath a train of box kites.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Constructed of cross-braced parallel struts, the box kite was open at its ends and wrapped with taut fabric around its cells. Using an anemometer to determine wind speed, an inclinometer to measure the kite string’s angle, and a spring balance to determine its lift, Hargrave carefully noted his invention’s performance and characteristics through successively refined versions.
On November 12, 1894, he demonstrated his faith in box kites by lifting himself 16 feet (5 meters) into the air supported by four of them strung in train. In a scientific paper published the following year, he cited this success as proof that “an extremely simple apparatus can be made, carried about, and flown by one man; and that a safe means of making an ascent with a flying machine, of trying the same without any risk of accident, and descending, is now at the service of any experimenter who wishes to use it.”2
Hargrave did not patent his invention because he wished the world to have free use of it for the betterment of all. In 1899, he traveled to London, where he proudly demonstrated it. Europe’s flight experimenters immediately embraced the box kite for its combination of high lift, inherent stability, and structural efficiency. To see just how influential this Australian’s thinking was in Europe, one has but to glance at Alberto Santos-Dumont’s 14-bis of 1906; it resembles nothing so much as a collision of Hargrave box kites hitting at different angles.
But it was in America that Lawrence Hargrave’s profound idea would first flower.
Human thought flows freely across natural barriers and national boundaries. Hargrave’s correspondence with fellow flight enthusiasts in the British Isles, Europe, and North America began circulating his ideas, which would contribute to flight’s invention.
Two Hargrave correspondents in North America were keen to fly. One would not know what to do with the Australian’s invention; the other would actually improve on it. The first was Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone’s famous inventor.
Bell had emigrated from Scotland to Canada