The Origins & History of the Royal Aeronautical Society by Air
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Master 21 December 2016 The Origins & History of the Royal Aeronautical Society By Air Commodore Bill Tyack Title Slide: Delighted to be here etc. Can you hear me? [Local connection, if appropriate, with slide] [Mention IOM commemorative stamps. Vincenzo Lunardi 15 September 1784; James Tytler, Edinburgh, 25 & 27 August 1784.] SLIDE 2: The Royal Aeronautical Society was founded in 1866 some 80 years after humans first took to the air in balloons and nearly 40 years before the Wright Brothers flew. Why was it formed then? There was no obvious event that stimulated its formation. The answer, I suggest, as in most things was the right combination of circumstances and people. SLIDE 3: So this evening I plan to describe the circumstances and people who founded the Society, then talk about the early activities and some of the notable people involved, while bringing the story up to date where appropriate. I will try to show the impact that the Society has had on the progress of flight. I did most of my research in the Society’s archives at the National Aerospace Library and I would like to thank Brian Riddle, the Chief Librarian, and Chris Male, the Publications Manager, for their help in finding material for the presentation. The lecture is nearly an hour long, so I had best get started SLIDE 4: The story starts long before 1866 with Sir George Cayley, who has rightly been called “The Father of Aeronautics”. Sir George, who was born in 1773, was a country squire living near Scarborough, in Yorkshire. He was an amazing man: a Member of Parliament, an educationalist who helped to found what is now Westminster University, and an engineering polymath, who designed, to name but a few: a self-righting lifeboat; a prosthetic arm; a gas-detection system for mines; an automatic signalling system for the railways; and the caterpillar track. However his greatest achievements were as an experimenter in aeronautics. In the 1790s, while still a young man, he was the first person to define the four forces 1 Master 21 December 2016 that act on any object in flight: lift versus weight and thrust versus drag. In 1823 he designed and built a man-carrying glider that flew for 900 feet. The picture shows a replica flying 150 years later in 1973. SLIDE 5: Many of Cayley’s ideas and experiments are recorded in five small leather-bound notebooks that are held in the Society’s National Aerospace Library at Farnborough. In them he recorded his ideas and designs, his experiments, and his observations from nature, mostly concerning the flight of birds. The drawing on the right records the dimensions and weight of a swan while the lower drawing shows the dimensions of a trout, that Cayley recognised was perfectly streamlined. I had the great privilege in 2012 of showing the notebooks on the BBC Television Antiques Roadshow. The notebooks have been digitised and can be viewed on line via the Society’s website. SLIDE 6: Cayley experimented with a series of model gliders leading up to the full-size man-carrying glider of 1823. He used a whirling arm mechanism to determine the lift and drag of various shapes. (EXPLAIN) SLIDE 7: In 1850 he designed a powered aircraft that has all the essential characteristics that we would recognise today. Do not be misled by the rather crude nature of this general arrangement diagram. Cayley had calculated the masses involved, the surface area and angle of attack required to produce lift and the power required. He built and tested models of the gunpowder engine. He understood the need for separate lift and propulsion. He invented the tension spoke wheel to reduce weight. SLIDE 8: Some form of helicopter toy has been around for at least 600 years. However, Cayley refined and popularised it, and the Wright Brothers recorded that one of these toys, given to them by their father, was the thing that first interested them in flight. SLIDE 9: Cayley wrote extensively and he tried throughout the early 1800s to gain support to form a society that would take a scientific 2 Master 21 December 2016 approach to flight. Pictured is his 1840 prospectus. However, he died in 1857 without achieving this ambition. But he had sowed the seed. SLIDE 10: I talked about the circumstances being right. So what was happening in 1866? In Britain, Queen Victoria had been on the throne for 29 years and her reign would last for a further 35 years. In London, the Metropolitan Fire Brigade was formed, but a cholera epidemic killed more than 5000 people. The Houses of Parliament were nearly complete. The Liberal Government fell over Parliamentary reform and, in consequence, there were violent demonstrations in Hyde Park. At the Oval, W G Grace scored 224 not out for All England versus Surrey just after his 18th birthday. SLIDE 11: In Europe, Alfred Nobel invented dynamite and Prussia attacked Austria during the wars of expansion that would lead to a unified German state under Otto von Bismarck. Further afield, the SS Great Eastern laid the first successful trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. America was coming to terms with peace after the ending of the Civil War – the world’s first industrial war - in 1865. Can you see the Union balloon in the top left corner of this picture of the Battle of Fairoaks? Next year, in 1867, the first ship would sail through the Suez Canal. SLIDE 12: So it was a time of significant technical development. For some time engineers had been forming Institutions to provide a professional framework for their technological development. SLIDE 13: As a measure of the state of aviation at the time, Frenchman Henri Giffard had made a flight in a balloon powered by an steam engine in 1852. He covered 27 km in three hours and executed some manoeuvres, but was unable to return against the wind. Twenty years later Dupuy de Lome had similar success with a larger airship. It would be some 40 years until Count Zeppelin in Germany and the Lebaudy Brothers in France developed practical airships. 3 Master 21 December 2016 SLIDE 14: And in Britain aeronautics, ballooning, the quest to fly was still not regarded as a serious scientific or technical pursuit as indicated by this quotation from the first Council meeting of the Society. Can you all read this? – if not read from screen. ‘‘The first application of the balloon as a means of ascending into the upper regions of the atmosphere, has been almost within the recollections of men now living; but, with the exception of some early experimenters, it has scarcely occupied the attention of scientific men, nor has the subject of Aeronautics been properly recognised as a distinct branch of science . The main reason for this may have been that, from the very commencement, balloons have been, with but few exceptions, employed for exhibition or for the purpose of public entertainment and, the first wonder having ceased, sundry performances have been resorted to in order to pander to the public taste for the grotesque and the hazardous . ‘‘ SLIDE 15: But things were changing. In 1862 the British Association for the Advancement of Science (founded in 1831) decided to commission a series of high altitude balloon flights to measure the characteristics of the upper atmosphere. The chosen pilot was Henry Coxwell, a noted professional balloonist, and the scientific observer was James Glaisher, Superintendent of Meteorology and Magnetism at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. Coxwell had a large, new balloon built, called the “Mammoth”, and in late summer of 1862 the pair made a series of flights from the Gas Works in Wolverhampton. (Balloonists at the time routinely used Town Gas, which was a less efficient, but more available and safer, lifting gas than hydrogen.) The final and epic flight of this series was made on 5 September 1862 and this engraving from the Illustrated London News shows the critical moment with Glaisher, who had passed out from lack of oxygen at 8500 metres, slumped in the basket and Coxwell, who had lost the use of his hands because of the extreme cold, 4 Master 21 December 2016 grasping the gas-venting line with his teeth to let out gas so the balloon would descend. SLIDE 16: Both survived and calculations after the flight estimated that they had reached at least 9500 metres and possibly 11,400 metres – 37,000 feet. All this was without oxygen or protective clothing. Glaisher typically carried some 24 scientific instruments on his flights, including five different barometers, four types of thermometer and two hygrometers to measure humidity. In all, Glaisher made 28 scientific flights into the upper atmosphere over a period of four years and I do not think that it is an exaggeration to compare Coxwell and Glaisher with today’s astronauts. SLIDE 17: The Wolverhampton Gas Works is now the University of Wolverhampton Science Park and there is a plaque to commemorate the record-making flight. So aeronautics was starting to be taken seriously. What was needed now was someone to do the legwork to make the Society happen. Cometh the time cometh the man! SLIDE 18: And that man was Frederick Brearey, a Yorkshireman living in Blackheath near Greenwich. His father had been a friend of Cayley’s and had witnessed several of Cayley’s aeronautical experiments and demonstrations. Young Frederick apparently knew nothing of Cayley’s work at the time, but later in life became aware of it from his elder sister and eagerly read all that Cayley had written. Brearey became enthused with the idea of flight.