The Airplane - Jay Spenser [89]
The emergence of the piston engine struck aerial experimenters as manna from heaven. Here was precisely what they needed: a small and light power source capable of propelling a heavier-than-air vehicle into the sky and keeping it aloft. Unfortunately, this new propulsion technology was so beguiling in and of itself that many aerial dreamers fixated on it and gave short shrift to the rest of flight’s challenges.
Those laboring under the chauffeur mind-set envisioned the airplane as a self-righting, self-running vehicle to be driven around the sky according to one’s whim. This coming invention would be a gasoline-powered conveyance much like a motor car. How different could they be?
All of this seduced Europe’s experimenters in particular, but not exclusively, into believing that flight’s primary challenge was getting into the air. Once aloft, the reassuring chauffeur paradigm said, the rest would be easy.
Gabriel Voisin was Europe’s premier aerial chauffeur during flight’s first decade. Borrowing heavily from Hargrave with Wright influence indiscriminately thrown in for good measure, Voisin constructed gliders and then powered models that swayed and wallowed alarmingly because of insufficient control. They were coaxable more than controllable. Damage was frequent but injuries mercifully few because of the very low speeds and altitudes at which they flew.
In the United States, Samuel Langley likewise fell prey to the chauffeur mind-set and would in fact be its chief exponent in the Americas. Viewing propulsion as the solution to the problem of flight, Langley devoted five years and most of his funding to sponsor development of a lightweight aero engine. By Langley’s own calculations, this engine was to weigh no more than 100 pounds (45 kilograms) and generate at least 12 hp.
The only person willing to try to meet Langley’s specifications was Stephen M. Balzer, the Hungarian-born mechanical engineer who tinkered together New York City’s first automobile in 1894. Balzer created a five-cylinder rotary engine for Langley, but it refused to perform properly. It initially turned out 4 hp and then 8 but not the required 12. With time passing and expenses mounting, Langley’s hopes fell.
In stepped Charles Manly, Langley’s able assistant, to save the day. A Cornell-trained Virginian in his twenties, Manly converted Balzer’s troubled engine from an air-cooled rotary to a liquid-cooled radial. When he finished revising it, the power plant developed 52 hp, an astonishing performance for a turn-of-the-century gasoline engine weighing just 200 pounds (90 kilograms) including its water-filled radiator and associated plumbing.
Now with four times the requested power at his disposal, Langley must have felt success was firmly within grasp. Unfortunately, the airframe he fitted this engine to was largely an afterthought. The Langley Aerodrome A was in fact little more than a fourfold scaling-up of his successful steam-powered models of 1896.
By taking this expedient route, Langley condemned his efforts to failure. Not only did he largely ignore the issue of controllability, but he also overlooked the consequences of scale effects. It should have come as no surprise that his machine failed to fly or that it broke apart the second time Charles Manly tried to fly it. That second plunge into the icy Potomac occurred on December 8, 1903, nine days before the Wrights succeeded at Kitty Hawk.
Compared to the remarkable Balzer-Manly radial, the Wrights’ engine was a primitive affair built with the help of mechanic Charlie Taylor, their employee in the bicycle shop. Orville described it thusly:
The motor used in the first flights at Kitty Hawk, N.C., on December 17, 1903, had [four] horizontal cylinders of 4-inch bore and 4-inch stroke. The ignition