Birdmen
Birdmen
Birdmen
Fulcrum
would later assert, “Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in
the nineteenth century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important.
His greatness appeared in every phase.”
In 1891, Lilienthal was finally ready to test his calculations. He
fashioned a set of fixed glider wings to the specifications he had devel-
oped from his research, strapped them to his shoulders, waited for
wind conditions to be right, ran downhill . . . and soared. For the next
five years, Otto Lilienthal made more than two thousand flights using
eighteen different gliders; fifteen were monofoil and three bifoil. He
maneuvered in the air by shifting his weight, usually by kicking his
feet and thus altering his center of gravity. He became so adept that at
times he could almost float, to allow photographers to gain proper
focus. Because dry plate negatives had been perfected in the 1880s,
the resulting images were of excellent resolution and soon made their
way across the ocean. Lilienthal became a world-renowned figure but
he had little use for popular acclaim. Instead, he continued to publish
scholarly papers and articles and in 1895 patented his invention.
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The heavens have been the home of the gods in virtually every re-
corded religion and not a single civilization from earliest antiquity
fails to depict men and often women in flight. Sometimes these an-
* Technically, airfoil refers only to the cross section of a wing, but it is often used syn-
onymously with wing itself, as it will be in these pages.
Since air wasn’t even yet understood to be an actual substance, the first
steps involved fluids. In 350 b.c., Aristotle hypothesized that an object
moving through liquid will encounter resistance, and a century later
Archimedes developed the first theory of fluid motion. From there, it
would take more than seventeen centuries until Leonardo took up the
problem and fluid dynamics began to be thought of as a rigorous dis-
cipline.
Leonardo’s great contribution was based in his observation that
when the banks of a river narrowed to constrict its flow, the water in
the narrower area speeded up so that the movement of the river re-
mained “continuous.” Leonardo could not quantify this function but
his observation was eventually generalized into a mathematical rela-
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tionship between speed and distance and eventually between speed
and pressure—the faster a fluid moves over a surface, the less pressure
it produces. But as Leonardo was also fascinated with bird flight, he
made some effort to apply the principle to gases. That ultimately
would result in a device where air moved farther and faster over the
top surface of an airfoil than under the bottom, thus creating uneven
pressure, which resulted in “lift.” He also understood that as an object
moved through a medium, it would encounter resistance, friction be-
tween the object and the medium, which would slow its progress, later
to be quantified as “drag.”
It took another century for the next tentative step forward, this in
1600 by Galileo. The great Pisan astronomer was the first to quantify
certain relationships in fluid dynamics and thus began to create a me-
chanical science from what had previously been only speculation. His
most significant insight was that resistance will increase with the den-
sity of the medium, which would eventually lead to the understanding
that as an airplane cruised at higher altitudes, fuel efficiencies would
increase.
But with all the advances by science’s titans, which later would
include Isaac Newton and Leonhard Euler, the applications contin-
ued to be solely in fluid dynamics—the resulting equations were then
simply assumed to apply equally to gas as to liquid.* In fact, using his
equations, Newton hypothesized that powered flight was impossible
because the weight of a motor needed to generate sufficient power
would always exceed the amount of lift that could be supplied by air-
foils that did not weigh more than the motor could support. For those
who believed flight was possible, the assumption remained that hu-
mans must emulate birds—that is, develop a mechanism to allow for
wings that flapped. Devices that attempted to mimic bird flight in this
manner were dubbed “ornithopters.” A sketch of such an apparatus
was found in one of Leonardo’s notebooks.
Aerodynamics as a separate science was born in 1799 when an
English polymath named George Cayley produced a remarkable sil-
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ver medallion. Cayley had observed that seagulls soared for great dis-
tances without flapping their wings and therefore hypothesized
aircraft wings as fixed rather than movable. On the front side of his
medallion, Cayley etched a monoplane glider with a cambered
(curved) wing, a cruciform tail for stability, a single-seat gondola, and
pedals, which he called “propellers,” to power the device in flight. On
the obverse side of his medallion, Cayley placed a diagram of the four
forces that figure in flight: lift, drag, gravity, and thrust. Although ac-
tual powered flight was a century away, Cayley’s construct was the
breakthrough that set the process in motion. In 1853, four years before
his death, a fixed-wing glider of Cayley’s design was the first to carry
a human passenger.* RANDOM HOUSE
Cayley’s hypotheses did not immediately take root. Not until the
1860s did his work finally spark a rush of interest. The Aeronautical
Society of Great Britain was formed in 1866; another was begun in
France three years later. Discussions of materials, airfoils, and resis-
tance began to drift across borders and disciplines. Theorizing grew in
sophistication and began to take in angle of incidence, the angle at
which an airfoil moves through the oncoming air, now called “angle of
attack”; and center of pressure, the point on a surface where the pres-
sure is assumed to be concentrated, just as center of gravity is the point
at which the entire mass of a body is assumed to be concentrated.
* Cayley, in his eighties, was too old to pilot the device so he recruited his none-too-
pleased coachman to undertake the experiment. After one harrowing ride, the coach-
man begged to be relieved of further flight duty.
Octave Chanute was born in Paris on February 18, 1832. His father
was a professor of history at the Royal College of France but in 1838
crossed the Atlantic to become vice president of Jefferson College in
Louisiana. The elder Chanut—Octave later added the e to prevent
mispronunciation—moved in 1844 to New York City, where Octave
attended secondary school, and, as he put it, “became thoroughly
Americanized.”2
Upon graduation, he decided to study engineering. As there were
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only four dedicated colleges of engineering in the United States, most
aspirants learned on the job, as Chanute chose to do. In 1849, he asked
for a job on the Hudson River Railroad at Sing Sing and, when told
nothing was available, signed on without pay as a chainman. Two
months later, he was put on the payroll at $1.12 per day and four years
after that, completely self-taught, was named division engineer at Al-
bany. But with immigrants pouring into Illinois to buy government
lands at $1.25 per acre, Chanute instead went west. He gained high
repute on a number of railroad assignments and eventually submitted
a design for the Chicago stockyards that was chosen over dozens of
others. With the successful completion of that project, Chanute was
asked to attempt a traverse of the “unbridgeable” Missouri River. Cha-
nute’s Hannibal Bridge at Kansas City not only successfully spanned
the waterway but elevated the city into a center of commerce, and its
designer to national acclaim.
Octave Chanute.
doing any of it on his own. One of his first and most important cor-
respondents was an impoverished expatriate Frenchman living in
Egypt named Louis Pierre Mouillard. Mouillard had trained in Paris
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as a painter but abandoned both the vocation and the city for a peri-
patetic existence in North Africa observing birds and attempting to
replicate their flight. He built gliders and experimented with them in
the sand dunes outside of Cairo. Although the test flights achieved
very limited success, Mouillard developed some sophisticated and far-
reaching insights concerning stability. He and Chanute would ex-
change letters until Mouillard’s death in 1897 and more than once
Chanute sent him money, as much for living expenses as to fund re-
search.* Chanute supplied journal articles and perspective gained from
other correspondents; Mouillard supplied Chanute with his evalua-
tions of glider mechanics, one of which may or may not have been so
significant as to change the course of aeronautical research.
* Mouillard was not unique in this regard. Chanute also sent money to other experi-
menters with limited funds.
* Chanute’s description of “aeroplanes” was “thin fixed surfaces, slightly inclined to the
line of motion, and deriving their support from the upward reaction of the air pressure
due to the speed, the latter being obtained by some separate propelling device, have
been among the last aerial contrivances to be experimented upon in modern times.”
sure of the height of wing curvature against average chord. The tables
Lilienthal had produced incorporating these measurements were un-
questioned as to accuracy.
Progress in Flying Machines was read by virtually everyone who was
experimenting in flight and anyone who was considering it. Its publi-
cation in many ways marked the beginning of aviation as a rigorous
science and fertilized the soil from which the Wright Flyer sprung
nine years later.
So popular was Chanute’s work that it almost instantly spawned a
rush of correspondence and conferences, and a demand for more lit-
erature. In Boston, James Means, a graduate of the Massachusetts In-
stitute of Technology and aviation enthusiast who had made a small
fortune marketing low-priced, mass-produced shoes to the average
American, decided to go Chanute one better. Like Chanute, Means
had retired from industry to join the quest for flight, but unlike the
railroad man, he made some formative efforts at design on his own.
Means saw the world more broadly than Chanute and was convinced
that aviation would reach fruition only with public support and even-
tual government funding. In 1895, a time when many conducted their
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researches privately for fear of being labeled cranks, Means decided to
generate enthusiasm by proclaiming in a popular medium all the won-
drous achievements in aviation either at or just over the horizon. Un-
like Progress in Flying Machines, whose content was often highly
technical, the Aeronautical Annual would be aimed at the educated
general reader.
Unfortunately, 1895 was a year before the wondrous achievements
that Means sought to publicize had actually occurred. Unable to extol
tomorrow, Means devoted his 1895 annual to yesterday. He included
extracts from Leonardo, articles by George Cayley, a reprint of his
own pamphlet Manflight, wind velocities for 1892, and even some
lines from the Iliad. Despite its lack of contemporary content, the
Aeronautical Annual was a great success.
Means published two more annuals. The 1896 edition was more up
to date, with articles by Chanute; Hiram Maxim, who had invented
both the machine gun and a better mouse trap before turning his in-
ventiveness to flight; Samuel Cabot, who wrote on propulsion; J. B.
Millet, who reported on an engineer from Australia named Lawrence
Hargrave, who had developed a “box kite” from which remarkable
results had been achieved; and a brilliant young theorist named Au-
gustus Moore Herring, who contributed an article titled “Dynamic
Flight.”
The 1897 edition, Means’s last, was by far his most influential. He
was finally able to bring to the public some significant advances, none
more noteworthy than a one-mile flight down the Potomac of a mo-
torized, steam-powered, unmanned “aerodrome” launched by Ameri-
ca’s most famous scientist and photographed by one of its most famous
inventors.
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