The Airplane

354 Pages·2009·5 MB·English

by  Spenser Jay

The Airplane
How Ideas Gave Us Wings
Jay Spenser
To Donald S. Lopez, 1923–2008
Contents
Introduction
1 Conception: The Thinker and the Dreamer
2 Birth: Wilbur, Orville, and the World
3 Configuration: Shapes and Ideas
4 Fuselage: Of Drums and Dragonflies
5 Wings, Part I: From Box Kites to Bridges
6 Wings, Part II: Cloud-Cutting Cantilevers
7 Empennage: Whale Flukes and Arrow Feathers
8 Flight Controls: The Chariot’s Reins
9 Flight Deck: Cockpits for Aerial Ships
10 Aero Propulsion: Prometheus Is Pushing
11 Landing Gear: Shoes, Canoes, and Carriage Wheels
12 Passenger Cabin: Voyaging Aloft
13 Systems Integration: Making Flying Safer
14 Today’s State of the Art: The Boeing Dreamliner
Postscript Tomorrow’s Wings: Future Air Travel Technologies
Notes
Acknowledgments
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Credits
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 ancestors 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 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,
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 bequeathing a degree of mobility utterly
inconceivable through the vast majority 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 vicariously 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
In Yorkshire in the northeast of England, a human being first imagined 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 aviation 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.
Few people today know Cayley’s name even though he single-handedly
established 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.
Sir George Cayley.
National Portrait Gallery, London
That honor belongs to another Englishman, Cayley’s self-appointed disciple
William S. Henson. Thrilled by Cayley’s visionary writings, Henson galloped
off to design a real airplane before the middle 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 different, yet their
overlapping efforts synergistically planted the seeds of flight.

The people of Yorkshire are known for a calm and deliberate nature.
George 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 51/2 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 propensity for headlong plunges)
carried people aloft more than a millennium before the invention of the balloon.
The Venetian Marco Polo lends credence to accounts of earlier aerial forays.
Writing in the late thirteenth century, he described personally witnessing people
flying 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 papermaking trade. A
majestic blue orb of varnished taffeta decorated ornately 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 imparts a gravity-defying upward force called levity.
Their success—and that of their archrival, French physicist Jacques
Alexandre Charles with his more advanced hydrogen balloons—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 sensibilities.
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 furniture, 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 decided that heavier-than-air
vehicles were flying’s future.