The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Story of American Aviation
Title: The Story of American Aviation
Author: Jim Ray
Release date: October 5, 2018 [eBook #58033]
Most recently updated: January 24, 2021
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson, Dave Morgan, Chuck Greif
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net
|
(In certain versions of this etext [in certain browsers] clicking on the image will bring up a larger version.) Copyright information from the original printed publication is included; our research indicates that this eBook is in the public domain in the U.S. (etext transcriber's note) |
The Story of
AMERICAN AVIATION
by JIM RAY
I L L U S T R A T E D B Y T H E A U T H O R
The thrilling story of how the airplane grew and the part it has played in the war and peace-time history of the United States of America
OVER 150 ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOR
OF AMERICA’S MOST FAMOUS AIRPLANES—OLD AND NEW
The John C. Winston Company
P H I L A D E L P H I A · T O R O N T O
Copyright, 1946, by
The John C. Winston Company
Copyright in Great Britain and in
The British Dominions and Possessions
————
Copyright in the Philippines
FIRST EDITION
MADE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FOREWORD
In the following pages, Jim Ray, talented in his work of presentation and a conscientious student of aviation, presents a chain of highlights in the progress of American aëronautics. The work as a whole is directed toward a sound conception of the steps which have been taken in aircraft development. In so far as possible, without being exhaustive, Mr. Ray has portrayed the engineering advancement which underlies the structure of our swiftly developing air age. The reader who thoroughly digests the text and illustrations of this book will find that it is an orderly and faithful guide.
Gill Robb Wilson
Aviation Editor,
New York Herald Tribune
Director of Aviation
State of New Jersey
INTRODUCTION
It is difficult to believe that, just a little over thirty years ago, I was a high-school student watching the pilots at the Wright Brothers’ exhibition of the world’s first flying machine. That machine weighed about eight hundred pounds. Its engine developed thirty horsepower. It flew at the then astounding speed of forty-two miles an hour, which is equal to the landing speed of our slowest light plane today. High-school students now are accustomed to the sight of giant airplanes whose weight is measured in tons and whose horsepower mounts to the thousands.
December, 1945, marks the forty-second anniversary of the first flight of an airplane. The progress of aviation since that first flight still seems unbelievable, even to one who has followed its development closely. The purpose of this book is to trace the progress of aviation in America and to tell the story of the men and machines that have given this country supremacy in the air.
In telling the story of American aviation from Kitty Hawk to the present day, I have been able to touch only the high spots in its dramatic progress. Space limitations prevent me from giving personal credit to the hundreds of pioneer airmen, engineers, and mechanics who have contributed so greatly to the progress of American aviation. Lack of space also makes it impossible to give the complete story of the great Government research organization, the National Advisory Committee for Aëronautics, whose work has been most fruitful in the advancement of civil and military aëronautics in the United States.
As we look over the record of the astounding progress of American aviation in forty-two years, let us salute our military leaders who have visualized the need for air power; the men who have designed and built our great engines and airplanes, and the leaders of commercial aviation who have made air travel fast, safe, and economical.
Jim Ray
Ottsville, Pennsylvania,
1945
CONTENTS
THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN AVIATION
THE DREAMERS
The idea of human flight has excited man’s imagination for thousands of years. From stories and legends handed down through the years, we know that even from earliest times people dreamed of flying. There are visions of conquering the air in the colorful legends of winged men and beasts found in ancient folklore. The winged statuary of the Egyptians was no doubt inspired by the desire to imitate the flight of birds. In Greek mythology Hermes, the messenger of the gods, is clothed with winged sandals and helmet.
Historians have unearthed stories in cuneiform writing of man’s attempts to fly. Some of these inscriptions date back more than five thousand years, to 3500 B.C. Perhaps the most famous of these stories is the ancient Babylonian tale of the shepherd boy, Etana, who rode on the back of an eagle.
The story of Dædalus and Icarus also tells us that man believed flying was somehow possible. Dædalus was a very clever man who lived with his son Icarus on the Island of Crete. The king of this island requested Dædalus to build a labyrinth or maze for him. Dædalus constructed the labyrinth so cleverly that only the king, who had the clue to the winding passages, could find his way out. One day the king became very angry at Dædalus and threw both him and his son Icarus into the labyrinth, intending that they should perish. Dædalus, who had been dreaming of flying, fashioned wings from wax and feathers, with which he and Icarus could fly to freedom. He cautioned Icarus that he must not fly too high or the sun would melt the wax in his wings. Icarus, impatient to escape, scarcely listened. Like birds the two flew into the air, quickly leaving the walls of the labyrinth. Dædalus, flying low, safely crossed the sea and reached Sicily. Icarus, unfortunately, failed to heed his father’s warning. Flying was so much fun that he rose higher and higher. Suddenly feathers began to drop one by one. Too late Icarus realized that the sun had melted the wax in his wings. Down, down he fell into the sea.
Another ancient myth of flying concerns Pegasus, the winged horse. Bellerophon, a Corinthian hero, rode Pegasus and with his help killed a horrible monster called the Chimera.
Not only did men of long ago dream of flying—some of them firmly believed it could be done. Archimedes, a great Greek mathematician born in 287 B.C., was one. In the year 1250 an Englishman, Roger Bacon, had the idea that a large hollow globe of thin metal could be made which, when filled with an ethereal air or liquid fire, would float on the air like a ship on water.
Leonardo da Vinci, the great Italian artist and scientist, who lived in the fifteenth century, spent years experimenting with the idea of flying. He made a number of sketches of wings to be fitted to the arms and legs of man. His plan for a parachute was soundly worked out and his idea that the wings of a flying machine should be patterned after the wings of the bat found expression in the doped fabric covering of our early airplanes.
Aviation today is such an accepted fact that we sometimes forget how men from different parts of the world had to work, suffer hardships, face ridicule, and even give their lives that flying might become possible.
In 1678, Besnier, a French locksmith, constructed a curious flying machine consisting of two wooden bars which rested on his shoulders. At the ends of the bars he attached muslin wings, arranged to open on the down stroke and close on the up stroke. The wings were operated by moving the arms and legs. Although Besnier failed to realize that no man had sufficient muscular strength to fly as the bird flies, he did sense part of the truth—that gliding with the air currents was possible. During his experiments he is said to have jumped from a window sill, glided over the roof of a near-by cottage, and landed on a barge in the river.
In 1799 an Englishman, George Cayley, conceived the idea that a kite could be built large enough to carry him up into the air. Instead of a string to hold the kite against the wind he decided to use the weight of his own body. He built a huge kite with a sustaining surface of three hundred square feet. When he held on to it and ran against the wind, the kite did indeed lift and carry him some distance through the air. Cayley’s kite was the first glider and also the very beginning of the modern airplane.
Wonderful though it may have seemed to him, no one paid any attention to Cayley’s discovery until 1867, when F. H. Wenham, also an Englishman, came to the conclusion that if a glider were attached to a propeller driven by an engine, it would fly. Wenham was right, of course, but he left his fine logic for other men to use. He did, however, leave something else by which we may remember him. He coined the word aëroplane. He took the Greek aëro, meaning air, and joined to it the Latin planus, meaning flat. The British still use the world aëroplane, but we in America use the simpler form airplane.
The first successful attempt to fly was made in France on June 5, 1783, when the Montgolfier brothers demonstrated their hot-air balloon. It rose to the height of one thousand feet and remained aloft for ten minutes. Benjamin Franklin, then in France, witnessed a flight of the Montgolfier balloon and referred to it in his chronicles. (As this book tells the story of the airplane, we shall not describe in detail the free balloon.)
In Germany, another man interested in flying was experimenting. Otto Lilienthal, in the year 1890, built for himself a queer-looking glider which resembled nothing so much as a bat with huge wings. Remember Leonardo da Vinci’s idea? To his bat wings Lilienthal attached a tail-like rudder for steering. For his own support on the glider he provided a pair of struts similar to the arm rests of crutches. Lilienthal would run down a hill into the wind with his glider. When sufficient speed had been attained, the glider and Lilienthal would rise triumphantly into the air. He learned to travel fair distances and was fired with the ambition to put an engine on his glider. He did design a 2½-horsepower engine, weighing ninety pounds and mounted on a biplane. Before trying his new machine, Lilienthal decided to make a short flight in his old glider. Somehow the glider stalled, one wing dropped off, and the whole thing fell to the ground, carrying Lilienthal to his death. His powered machine was never tried. Other men, however, believed that Lilienthal had been correct in his idea of flying, and his death did not stop their experiments.
About this time in America, a young man, just out of college, built a glider patterned after a sea gull. This young man was a Californian, John J. Montgomery. He worked alone and was so timid that he tried out his glider from a near-by hill at three o’clock in the morning. He was afraid that onlookers would laugh at him if his glider failed. It did not fail. He made a flight of six hundred feet—the first of many successful flights. Montgomery solved many of the problems of flight with little or no funds or encouragement. Because he worked alone and was until recently almost unknown, few written records of his work are available.
All through the nineteenth century men continued their experiments in order to bring to a reality the dream of human flight. With each generation, they moved ever closer to the fringe of the secret but never quite grasped it.
In 1842 an Englishman, W. S. Henson, was optimistic enough to patent his monoplane Ariel for a flight from Britain to India. Though his design had a cambered, or slightly curved, wing, tricycle landing gear, and excellent bracing, it never got beyond the model stage. Another Englishman, John Stringfellow, worked for four years on his steam-driven monoplane. It also did not progress beyond a few model flights. In 1876, a young Frenchman, Alphonse Penaud, read an article that ridiculed man’s presumptuous attempts to fly. This angered the boy and he determined forthwith to conquer the air. Though lack of money balked his ambition, he constructed a number of models which contained many features found in present-day airplanes. Incidentally, Penaud was the first to use an elastic band to propel his model, as boys do. Laurence Hargrave, an American, was the first man to make a study of the cellular or box-kite type of wing construction. He confined his efforts to building models. His ideas influenced the work of Lilienthal, who incorporated them in the powered airplane he was building at the time of his death.
AVIATION IN AMERICA IN ITS EARLY DAYS
The story of the heavier-than-air machines that flew really begins in the United States in the early 1890’s. Octave Chanute, born in France and reared in America, was one of the first men to make a scientific approach to the problem of flying machines. A thorough scientist, he had followed the progress of all flight experiments the world over. He built gliders with one, two, and even five pairs of wings and tested all of them on the sand dunes of Lake Michigan. His most successful glides were made with a biplane glider. In 1894, he published a book called Progress of Flying Machines, which covered all the efforts of men like himself who had experimented with man-carrying gliders and flying machines. This book, without doubt, was responsible for bringing to this country the honor of being the birthplace of the first successful, man-carrying, power-driven, flying machine. A copy of Octave Chanute’s book fell into the hands of two ambitious and enterprising young bicycle makers of Dayton, Ohio—Orville and Wilbur Wright.
At the time when Octave Chanute was experimenting with his gliders on the Michigan sand dunes, another aviation pioneer was hard at work in his laboratory in Washington, D. C. This man was Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. In this position he had the opportunity to pursue his studies in the aëronautical side of physics.
After much study and experimentation, he succeeded in building a tiny, steam-powered model which flew for six seconds. Langley was so much encouraged by the performance of his first model that he built a larger one. This model, weighing 26 pounds and powered with a one-horsepower steam engine, made a flight of three thousand feet in 1896.
After this flight Professor Langley felt that he had proved his theory of flight. The public became interested and the government appropriated $50,000 for Langley’s use in the construction of a full-size airplane.
Langley built his plane without much difficulty, but could not find anyone to make an engine large enough for it. Finally, Charles Manley, an expert engineer, asked for permission to build the engine. Manley’s engine was a five-cylinder, radial gasoline engine that developed 51 horsepower and was far ahead of its time. It was years before American radial engines were used successfully in airplanes.
Professor Langley called his machine the Aerodrome, and by October, 1903, the plane was ready for its test flight, with Manley to guide it. The Aerodrome was to be launched from a catapulting platform built on the roof of a houseboat. The houseboat was anchored on the Potomac River near Washington. As it left the platform the machine crashed into the river, and the trial was a dismal failure. The newspapers and the public ridiculed Langley, but he and Manley, who was unhurt in the crash, repaired the machine for another trial. This test took place on December 8, 1903, and again the Aerodrome crashed into the river. Manley once more escaped injury, but Langley and the government were abused by the public for wasting money. Langley was out of money himself, the government could not furnish funds for further trials, so the experiments were ended. The professor, discouraged and brokenhearted, gave up.
THE DREAM FULFILLED
Out in Dayton, Ohio, there were two small brothers, who dreamed, as countless other children before them had dreamed, of flying like birds through the air. Their dreams were heightened by a small toy given to them by their father, the pastor of a local church. This toy was to lead to an idea which had a profound effect on the world. You would probably call it a flying propeller. It consisted of a wooden propeller which slipped over a notched stick. By placing a finger against the propeller and rapidly pushing it up the notched stick, the propeller was made to whirl up off the end of the stick and fly into the air. The brothers, young as they were, never quite forgot this little toy as they continued to dream of flying like birds through the air.
Though the brothers continued to dream of flying, they were not the kind of lads who spent all their time in dreaming. They made kites which flew a little better and a little higher than those made by the other boys in the neighborhood. They built a press to print their own little newspaper, and they dabbled in woodcuts. To carve out porch posts for their father’s home they built an eight-foot wood-turning lathe. Indeed, they were the sort of boys who caused the neighbors to say, “What will they think of next?”
Small town pastors in the early 1890’s did not receive princely salaries. The brothers knew that if they ever wanted to see their dreams come true they must earn their own capital. In the early nineties America was in the midst of the bicycle craze. Everyone who could possibly afford to do so owned a bicycle of some sort and belonged to a cycle club. Being mechanically minded, the brothers did the logical thing. They set themselves up in a small bicycle shop in Dayton, next door to their home.
The bicycle shop in Dayton prospered, for the brothers were careful and expert mechanics, and cyclists in need of repairs made their way to the Wright Brothers’ shop.
The two boys who had never forgotten the little toy helicopter which their father had given them years before, were Orville and Wilbur Wright. Although their bicycle shop prospered the brothers continued to dream of flying. Unlike others, who, all over the world, had been dreaming of the same thing, the dreams of the Wright Brothers persisted. They read everything that had been written about experiments in flying. Every spare moment of their time was spent in thinking about flight.
Soon after Octave Chanute’s book Progress of Flying Machines was published in 1894, Orville and Wilbur Wright read a copy. Although they had long discussed the idea of flight, it was not until they read Chanute’s book that they were able to consider seriously any experiments of their own.
Chanute’s book did not give the answers to the questions in the minds of the Wright Brothers. It was primarily a record of man’s attempts to fly and of his failures. However, it served its purpose because it created many more questions in the minds of Orville and Wilbur Wright. They wrote to Chanute for further information on what man had to do in order to fly.
The noted scientist answered the questions of the Wright Brothers as best he could and sent them a set of tables derived from his studies of air pressure in relation to wing surfaces. The Wrights saw in these figures a possible clue to the mysteries of flight, and in 1900 they built an experimental glider based on the information they had received from Chanute. What followed this first glider experiment is the key to the problem of why the Wright Brothers eventually succeeded while other men failed. When the glider they constructed on the principle of the then most perfect data failed to fly, they were capable of realizing that the scientific research—and not their own efforts—had been at fault.
The Wright Brothers were not only inspired mechanics (as many people still believe today) but serious scientists, working along the soundest lines. In their keen desire to know what air pressure on wings really was, they cleared a corner of their bicycle shop and built a small wind tunnel with spare lumber and an old electric fan. They built small wing sections of various shapes and experimented with them in their wind tunnel. The electric fan was used to create the moving air around the wing section. By attaching the wing sections to a supporting frame and connecting the frame with a pointer and dial, they were able to keep a record of the effect of moving air on each experimental wing section. Through their wind tunnel research the Wright Brothers discovered the four forces that control all heavier-than-air flight: lift, thrust, weight, and drag. They found that a slight curve or camber in the wing section would cause the moving air to travel farther over the top of the wing surface than along the under side. This made the air pressure greater under the wing, gave a suction effect above the wing, and caused it to rise, creating lift. They discovered that a wing section of the proper camber would counteract the weight of gravity. Thus, a wing must be so designed that, with a certain amount of air flowing around it, it would lift a certain weight. They also discovered that air flow against any surface attached to the wing would cause a resistance or drag. Hundreds of experiments in their wind tunnel with various types of wing shapes gave the Wrights a series of tables from which to design a wing that would create the lift for a designed weight.
Then, after testing more than 200 wing designs and plane surfaces in their wind tunnel, the Wright Brothers found out how to figure correctly the amount of curve, or camber, that was essential to weight-carrying wings. They discovered, too, that before man could be flown through the air, he must have his wings attached firmly to a body or platform which was firm and controllable. The Wrights in their earliest experiments had realized that to be practical their machine must be built not only to fly in a straight line, but also in order that it could be steered to the right or to the left. One day, Orville was twisting a cardboard box in his hand when Wilbur noticed it. Immediately he saw the solution to the problem of steering their airplane. The result was a design which changed the lift of either end of the wing by warping its surface. If one end of the wing was warped to give it more lift, the machine would lift on that side and fall off into a turn. Thus the problem of steering was solved by the Wrights.
FIRST FLIGHT
After a year of exhaustive study and experiments with models in their wind tunnel, the Wright Brothers were ready to experiment with a man-carrying glider. With the thoroughness that was typical of every move of the Wrights, the brothers asked the government to let them have information on meteorological conditions all over the country. By studying the weather charts they were able to find a locality where there was a continual flow of wind. This would be nature’s wind tunnel where they could test their glider day after day. Through their study of the charts they found that the wind conditions at Kitty Hawk, on the North Carolina coast, seemed to offer the best possibilities for their glider test.
Orville and Wilbur Wright began their experiments with a small man-carrying glider at Kitty Hawk in 1900. From that time until 1903 they made hundreds of successful glider flights and kept accurate records of each flight. They recorded wind velocity, angle of flight, duration of flight, time of day, temperature, humidity, and sky conditions overhead with the typical Wright attention to detail. Each year the Wrights constructed new gliders which embodied principles they had discovered for themselves during their flights at Kitty Hawk. Each glider was larger and had longer and narrower wings than the one before. During the fall of 1902 the brothers recorded nearly a thousand flights in a glider with a wingspan of thirty-two feet. It had a front elevator and a vertical tail which helped to maintain lateral stability.
By 1903 the Wright Brothers were ready to build a powered man-carrying flying machine. Their experiments had shown them just how much moving air was necessary to create lift in such a machine. To create the needed thrust, an engine having eight horsepower and weighing not over 200 pounds had to be fitted into the machine. Such an engine was not available, so the Wrights built one in their shop at Dayton, Ohio. They were ready to ship their airplane to Kitty Hawk, N. C., in the fall of 1903.
A cold wind whipped across those buff stretches of Kitty Hawk on Thursday, December 17. A coin was tossed into the air between Orville and Wilbur Wright. Orville won the toss, climbed up and stretched prone on the wing of the flying machine. He clutched the controls.
There were no cheering crowds; a mere handful of people were there. Running along its launching track, the 750 pounds of plane, engine, and passenger shot up into the air so fast that Wilbur, at the wing-tip, could not keep up. For three and one-half seconds the plane was in the air. It came to rest 105 feet from the take-off. Powered flight was born!