Airplane : How Ideas Gave Us Wings
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THE AIRPLANE HOW IDEAS GAVE US WINGS JAY SPENSER To Donald S. Lopez, 1923–2008 CONTENTS Introduction vi 1 CONCEPTION: The Thinker and the Dreamer 1 2 BIRTH : Wilbur, Orville, and the World 16 3 CONFIGURATION: Shapes and Ideas 37 4 FUSELAGE: Of Drums and Dragonflies 56 5 WINGS, PA RT I: From Box Kites to Bridges 86 6 WINGS, PA RT II: Cloud-Cutting Cantilevers 112 7 EMPENNAGE: Whale Flukes and Arrow Feathers 136 8 FLIGHT CONTROLS: The Chariot’s Reins 142 9 FLIGHT DECK: Cockpits for Aerial Ships 173 10 AERO PROPULSION: Prometheus Is Pushing 201 11 LANDING GEAR: Shoes, Canoes, and Carriage Wheels 238 12 PASSENGER CABIN: Voyaging Aloft 253 V CONTENTS 13 SYSTEMS INTEGRATION: Making Flying Safer 281 14 TODAY’S STATE OF THE ART : The Boeing 787 Dreamliner 292 POSTSCRIPT TOMORROW’S WINGS: Future Air Travel Technologies 305 Notes 311 Ackowledgments 319 Photo Credits 321 Index 323 About the Author Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher INTRODUCTION THE QUEST FOR WINGS— HUMANKIND’S OLDEST DREAM In New Hampshire one morning when I was seven years old, I awoke and found I could fly. Concentrating hard, I levitated off the floor, flew downstairs, rounded a tight corner, and soared across the living room of my grandparents’ farmhouse without ever touching down. It was a dream, of course, but it thrilled me, and decades later the lingering memory remains vivid. It turns out that I’m not alone; at one time or another in our lives, most of us have fantasized about flying. Flying is humankind’s oldest dream. Ever since our earliest ances- tors first gazed skyward, we human beings have envied the birds their ability to slip gravity’s bonds. The result is a pan-cultural longing for wings so deeply rooted in our psyche that it sings to our soul and is perennially our favorite metaphor for freedom. The power of flight’s siren call is difficult to overstate. Eons before a Hellenistic sculptor crafted the Nike of Samothrace—antiquity’s great expression of this wish—flying was already a favored theme of artists and storytellers. From the dawn of history, it has colored our myths and our magical thinking. In religions, the ability to fly is universally equated with the divine. As human technological prowess advanced, this yearning escalated into a focused quest for wings that ultimately succeeded because of people like you and me—dreamers all, and all mere mortals of flesh VII INTRODUCTION and blood. It is to their vision, ingenuity, collaboration, and sacrifice that we owe the modern wonder of air travel. Inventing the airplane is one of history’s greatest adventures, yet books about flight seldom do the subject justice. Too often they fail to evoke the underlying wonder of the subject matter. Worse still, air travel itself is often little fun these days. Long lines at airport security checkpoints, crowded flights, and today’s lack of in-flight service and amenities have squeezed the glamour out of what should by all rights be an exciting adventure. As for the jetliners themselves, we take them for granted. Whether we as individuals love to fly or dread it, we tend to view the airliners we board as strictly a conveyance—glorified buses with wings—and thus fail to see them for what they really are: an invention bequeath- ing a degree of mobility utterly inconceivable through the vast major- ity of human existence. But what if we could see the jetliner with fresh eyes? Better still, what if we could understand the great ideas in history that laid its keel and sent it soaring high into the blue? Best of all, what if we could stand elbow to elbow with flight’s pioneers and share vicari- ously in those “aha” moments when they solved aviation’s technical challenges? Then flying would be an adventure again. In this new century marked by profound global challenges, may this book remind us what we humans can do when we share a grand vision and collaborate to see it achieved. JAY SPENSER SEATTLE, WASHINGTON MARCH 2008 1 CONCEPTION THE THINKER AND THE DREAMER An uninterrupted navigable ocean that comes to the threshold of every man’s door ought not to be neglected as a source of human gratification and advantage. —SIR GEORGE CAYLEY (1773–1857)1 n Yorkshire in the northeast of England, a human being first imag- Iined the airplane. This scientifically accurate emergence happened a hundred years before the Wright brothers invented the real thing. At first glance, Yorkshire seems an odd place for the science of avia- tion to begin. However, history shows that creativity flourishes where cultures mix, and England’s largest traditional county certainly boasted plenty of that. Celtic tribes lost to the mists of time, marching Roman legions, Angle farmers settling from Germany, and marauding Vikings invading from Denmark all called it home at one time or another. The airplane’s conceptual inventor was Yorkshire baronet Sir George Cayley. Born in December 1773 at Scarborough on the North Sea, Cayley inherited his title, wealth, and large landholdings upon the death of his father. But a greater inheritance had already come his way at birth, for he possessed a brilliant mind. 2 THE AIRPLANE Few people today know Cayley’s name even though he single-handedly estab- lished the science of aviation and laid a foundation for others to build on. The Wright brothers never would have left the ground without his powerful ideas, for example, but they were far from the first to try. That honor belongs to another Eng- lishman, Cayley’s self-appointed disciple William S. Henson. Thrilled by Cayley’s visionary writings, Henson galloped off Sir George Cayley. to design a real airplane before the mid- dle of the nineteenth century. Although his premature attempt failed, Henson at least showed the world what the airplane would be. If Cayley was the thinker, Henson—four decades his junior—was the dreamer. The two men hardly could have been more differ- ent, yet their overlapping efforts synergistically planted the seeds of flight. he people of Yorkshire are known for a calm and deliberate nature. TGeorge Cayley from an early age broke the mold. Around his tenth birthday, this enthusiastic young aristocrat was excited in particular by news sweeping England: human beings had flown in Europe. On November 21, 1783, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and the marquis d’Arlandes ascended into the heavens in a new invention called the balloon. According to the reports, these Frenchmen drifted over the city of Paris for twenty-five minutes, covering 5½ miles (9 kilometers) before setting down safely. At that time, the event was hailed as the first time human beings had ever flown. Today we know this was probably not the case. While history does not provide definitive proof of earlier manned ascents, it is quite likely that large kites (a dangerous way to fly, given their pro- pensity for headlong plunges) carried people aloft more than a mil- lennium before the invention of the balloon. The Venetian Marco Polo lends credence to accounts of earlier aerial forays. Writing in the CONCEPTION: The Thinker and the Dreamer 3 late thirteenth century, he described personally witnessing people fly- ing aboard large kites in China. Pilâtre de Rozier and Arlandes’ vehicle of 1783 was the brainchild of Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier, two brothers in France’s paper- making trade. A majestic blue orb of varnished taffeta decorated or- nately in gold, this hot-air balloon was open at the bottom and was launched after being filled with smoke from a large outdoor blaze before its restraints were released. Surprisingly, the Montgolfiers did not know why their balloon sailed into the sky. They did not understand that hot air has a lower density than cold air and is thus lighter, so they instead endorsed the classical notion that it was smoke’s natural tendency to rise that made their invention buoyant. Lending pseudoscientific credence to this flawed theory, they further asserted that smoke contained a previously unidentified substance—called Montgolfier gas, naturally—that im- parts a gravity-defying upward force called levity. Their success—and that of their archrival, French physicist Jacques Alexandre Charles with his more advanced hydrogen bal- loons—launched a rapturous, all-out French obsession with lighter- than-air flight. Part of this euphoria was the uplifting grace of balloons themselves, which lyrically fulfilled humankind’s age-old dream of flight. But there was more to this rampant “balloonacy” than poetic sen- sibilities. With the industrial revolution then under way in England and spreading to Europe, balloons also symbolized man’s growing technological prowess and the heady excitement of new frontiers. Balloons even became a favorite decorative motif in French furni- ture, plates, paintings, mantel clocks, and chandeliers. Back in Yorkshire, the success of the Montgolfiers kindled in young George Cayley a lifelong fascination with flight. But the balloon itself didn’t hold the Yorkshire boy’s interest for very long. He quickly de- cided that heavier-than-air vehicles were flying’s future. Two factors shaped this conviction. The first was Cayley’s belief that a flying machine, to be practical, must be dirigible (steerable) so people could fly it where they liked instead of drifting at the whim of the wind. The second was his delight in a flying toy perfected a year 4 THE AIRPLANE after that first balloon flight by two other Frenchmen, the naturalist Launoy and a mechanic named Bienvenu. Launoy and Bienvenu’s toy was a rudimentary helicopter with a cen- tral shaft, corks at both ends with feathers angled to provide lift as they spun, and a bow (as in bow and arrow) drawn taut by winding its string around the shaft.