The Airplane - Jay Spenser [73]
With this last issue resolved, handling was excellent. Tight turns and figure eights were flown with impunity. On September 26, with his father watching, Wilbur made circle after circle, covering 11 miles (18 kilometers) in twenty minutes, landing only because he ran the gas tank dry. On October 4, Orville flew more than 20 miles, and the next day his brother flew just shy of 25 miles (40 kilometers) in thirty-eight minutes.
Here at last was a manned, powered, heavier-than-air vehicle that was sturdy, reliable, maneuverable, and could remain aloft for extended periods. If the Wright 1903 Flyer was the world’s first true airplane, the 1905 Flyer III was the first practical airplane. It thus ranks as of nearly equal historical significance. This priceless artifact is today displayed at Carillon Historical Park in Dayton, Ohio.
In January 1906, the respected French journal L’Aérophile published the basic text with illustrations of the Wright brothers’ pending U.S. patent. Rejected as originally submitted by Wilbur and Orville in March 1903, the application was revised with the help of a patent attorney and resubmitted in 1904. The U.S. government would grant this patent in May 1906.
The article included a description, in the Wrights’ own words and bolstered by helpful diagrams, of their three-axis control system. It explained the concept of lateral control based in the wings (something no Europeans yet considered) and described how this control, in coordination with use of the rudder, brings about smooth turns in the air.
Afraid of falling off to either side, Gabriel Voisin equipped his biplanes with fabric panels between the wings to prevent sideslips.
Museum of Flight, Seattle
Here, a full two and a half years before Wilbur’s flights at Le Mans and two years before Farman’s wobbling circuit, was the Wrights’ secret laid bare for all to see. Although L’Aérophile was required reading for Europe’s active early flight community whose epicenter was Paris, not one experimenter saw the obvious.
Why not? Here again we see the tyranny of a reigning paradigm. Instead of a mechanism for roll control, the Europeans sought sources of inherent stability that would keep airplanes from tilting laterally. This was why Alberto Santos-Dumont gave his 14-bis of October 1906 so much dihedral.15 It was also why Gabriel Voisin and others often equipped their biplanes with sideslip-inhibiting vertical fabric panels aligned fore and aft between the wings.
Yes, Europe’s chauffeur mind-set had effectively blinded one and all to the truth. Farman and Léon Delagrange, France’s two top aviators, specialized in flying cross-country because setting distance records did not require turning. Others too accepted and operated within the constraints of inadequate control. Then Wilbur arrived to unchain their minds.
July 4, 1908, dawned breezy with heavy overcast in Hammondsport, a small town in upstate New York near the Canadian border. It had rained much of the day, dampening Independence Day spirits, but by late afternoon it started to clear. Now as dusk approached, raking sunshine turned the surrounding hills a vivid green against black clouds.
On a long grassy slope near town, Glenn Hammond Curtiss checked his June Bug, a spindly biplane with yellow-tinged wings that bowed together. Barely thirty years old, Curtiss had personally designed this airplane and its engine, which he built with the help of the staff of his engine company. Slight of stature with a perpetual frown and piercing blue eyes, Glenn Curtiss was Hammondsport’s most famous resident, a former daredevil motorcycle racer turned businessman, engine maker, and now pioneer aviator.
Pioneer aviator Glenn Curtiss and friend.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Assorted friends, helpers, and official observers clustered with him around his airplane. Dominating this inner circle was Alexander Graham Bell, Curtiss’ elderly patron, whose ebullience was audible at a distance.