The Wright Brothers: Stuff that I didn’t know

Wrapping up my review of The Wright Brothers by David McCullough… (previous posting)

My conception of the Wright Brothers was that they were able to draw heavily on the work of Otto Lilienthal and others for basic aerodynamics. McCullough says that this is essentially untrue. Textbook aerodynamics, such as it was back then, was simply wrong, except for the basics such as “Lift came from air moving faster over the arched top of a wing, thereby making the pressure there less than that under the wing.” The Wright Brothers had to build their own wind tunnel before they could succeed at Kitty Hawk:

It was not just that their machine had performed so poorly, or that so much still remained to be solved, but that so many of the long-established, supposedly reliable calculations and tables prepared by the likes of Lilienthal, Langley, and Chanute—data the brothers had taken as gospel—had proven to be wrong and could no longer be trusted. Clearly those esteemed authorities had been guessing, “groping in the dark.” … With their former trust in the calculations of Lilienthal and Chanute shattered, the brothers set out that autumn of 1901 to crack the code of aeronautics themselves. It was a brave decision and a crucial turning point. Of primary importance was to find a way to achieve accurate measurements of the “lift” and “drag” of a wing’s surface, and the ingenuity, as well as patience, they brought to their experiments were like nothing done by anyone until then. For three months, working in one of the upstairs rooms at the bicycle shop, they concentrated nearly all of their time on these “investigations” and with stunning results. They devised and built a small-scale wind tunnel—a wooden box 6 feet long and 16 inches square, with one end open and a fan mounted at the other end, and this powered, since the shop had no electricity, by an extremely noisy gasoline engine.

For nearly two months the brothers tested some thirty-eight wing surfaces, setting the “balances” or “airfoils”—the different-shaped hacksaw blades—at angles from 0 to 45 degrees in winds up to 27 miles per hour. It was a slow, tedious process, but as Orville wrote, “those metal models told us how to build.” Octave Chanute was astonished by what Wilbur had to report. “It is perfectly marvelous to me how quickly you get results with your testing machine,” he wrote. “You are evidently better equipped to test the endless variety of curved surfaces than anybody has ever been.”

It was even worse when it came to propeller design:

Meantime, the design of the propellers had become a still bigger challenge. “I think the hardest job Will and Orv had was with the propellers,” Charlie later said. “I don’t believe they ever were given enough credit for that development.” The problem became more complex the more the brothers studied it. Much to their surprise, they could find no existing data on air propellers. They had assumed they could go by whatever rule-of-thumb marine engineers used for the propellers on boats, and accordingly drew on the resources of the Dayton library only to find that after a hundred years in use the exact action of a screw propeller was still obscure. Once more they were left no choice but to solve the problem themselves. “Our minds,” said Orville, “became so obsessed with it that we could do little other work.”

They began to see the propeller as an airplane wing traveling in a spiral course, and that if they could calculate the effect of a wing traveling a straight course, why could they not calculate the effect of one traveling in a spiral course?

The new Flyer, as they called it, would have two propellers positioned between the two wings just to the rear of the operator. One would turn clockwise, the other, counterclockwise, so the spinning, or gyroscopic action, of the one would balance that of the other. Making the propellers with the proper diameter, pitch, and surface area proved no great problem. Each had a diameter of 8 and a half feet and were made of three spruce laminations glued together and shaped by hand with a hatchet and spoke shaver, or “drawknife,” as used by wheelwrights. That they were different from any propellers ever built before was certain, and the last major problem had been resolved.s

And they had to invent the aluminum-block engine:

It was shortly before the New Year when the Wright brothers sent out letters to manufacturers of automobile engines in seven states asking if they could supply an off-the-shelf engine light enough in weight but with sufficient power for their purposes. There was only one response, and in that case the motor was much too heavy. So again they had some original work to do and they had had no experience building engines.

For Charlie Taylor, however, the description applied almost perfectly, except that he was more than a clever mechanic, he was a brilliant mechanic and for the brothers a godsend. His only prior experience with a gasoline engine had been trying to repair one in an automobile a few years before. But that January, working in the back shop with the same metal lathe and drill press used for building bicycles, he went to work and six weeks later had it finished. The motor had four cylinders with a 4-inch bore and a 4-inch stroke. It was intended to deliver 8 horsepower and weigh no more than 200 pounds, to carry a total of 675 pounds, the estimated combined weight of the flying machine and an operator. As it turned out, the motor Charlie built weighed only 152 pounds, for the reason that the engine block was of cast aluminum provided by the up-and-coming Aluminum Company of America based in Pittsburgh.

McCullough is very weak on explaining aerodynamics and the challenges of flying. Here’s one passage:

In a glide later the same day, the machine kept rising higher and higher till it lost all headway, exactly “the fix” that had plunged Otto Lilienthal to his death. Responding to a shout from Orville, Wilbur turned the rudder to its full extent and only then did the glider settle slowly to the ground, maintaining a horizontal position almost perfectly, and landing with no damage or injury.

I’m not sure if it is the Wright brothers who used the term “rudder” for what we today call “elevator” or if McCullough simply conflated the two. It is tough to see how a high pitch attitude and incipient stall could be corrected with a rudder (yaw control). NASA shows a Wright Flyer having more or less conventional controls and nomenclature.

The Wrights were competing against a Smithsonian-led government-funded project run by the best minds of the time:

Langley maintained extreme secrecy about his efforts. Every aspect of his heavily financed Smithsonian experiments remained confidential. In sharp contrast to the affable Chanute, Langley, a thorough Boston Brahmin, had what his friends kindly termed a “shell of hauteur.” Since the launching of his pilotless, steam-powered aerodrome in 1896, Langley and his Smithsonian “team” had been at work on a far larger, and again well-financed, version of the same machine, except that this would be powered by a gasoline engine and carry a single operator.

On July 14 came the news that in a matter of days, Samuel Langley was to test his “latest contrivance” on the mosquito-infested banks of the Potomac River near Quantico, Virginia, thirty miles south of Washington. This time it was to be a motor-powered “full-fledged airship” called “The Great Aerodrome,” capable of carrying one operator. It had cost $50,000 in public money—in Smithsonian resources and the largest appropriation yet granted by the U.S. War Department. Professor Langley and several of his friends, including Alexander Graham Bell, contributed another $20,000.

… neither [Wright] ever said the stunning contrast between their success and Samuel Langley’s full-scale failure just days before made what they had done on their own all the more remarkable. Not incidentally, the Langley project had cost nearly $70,000, the greater part of it public money, whereas the brothers’ total expenses for everything from 1900 to 1903, including materials and travel to and from Kitty Hawk, came to a little less than $1,000, a sum paid entirely from the modest profits of their bicycle business.

After their historic achievement, the Wrights tried to turn it into a business, something Wilbur didn’t expect them to be good at:

In business it is the aggressive man, who continually has his eye on his own interest, who succeeds [he wrote]. Business is merely a form of warfare in which each combatant strives to get the business away from his competitors and at the same time keep them from getting what he already has. No man has ever been successful in business who was not aggressive, self-assertive and even a little bit selfish perhaps. There is nothing reprehensible in an aggressive disposition, so long as it is not carried to excess, for such men make the world and its affairs move. . . . I entirely agree that the boys of the Wright family are all lacking in determination and push. That is the very reason that none of us have been or will be more than ordinary businessmen.

The U.S. military gave the Wright Brothers the cold shoulder for at least five years and the Smithsonian actually tried to say that their own Langley had been the first to build a flying machine. They blamed the early 1900s crashes on the launch mechanism and demonstrated the machine, now heavily modified by Glenn Curtis, the Wrights’ competitor, doing a bit of flying 10 years after the fact. The Wrights went to Europe and were warmly received, though the French government was not always helpful: “A dozen or more ribs were broken, one wing ruined, the cloth torn in countless places. Everything was a tangled mess. Radiators were smashed, propeller axles broken, coils badly turned up, essential wires, seats, nuts, and bolts, all missing. … But then Wilbur learned that the chaos and damage had not been caused at Dayton, but at Le Havre by careless French customs inspectors.”

It was not always a perfect match:

Léon Delagrange, who before becoming an aviator had been a sculptor and painter, could not help puzzling over what went on behind Wilbur’s masklike countenance, and, being French, found it hard to comprehend or warm to someone who seemed so devoid of the elemental human emotions and desires. “Even if this man sometimes deigns to smile, one can say with certainty that he has never known the douceur [sweetness] of tears. Has he a heart? Has he loved? Has he suffered? An enigma, a mystery

Further, Peyrey, unlike others, had discovered how exceptionally cultured Wilbur was, how, “in rare moments of relaxation,” he talked with authority of literature, art, history, music, science, architecture, or painting. To Peyrey, the devotion of this preacher’s son to his calling was very like that of a gifted man dedicating his life to a religious mission.

The Wrights took their patents to war in the courts (Wikipedia) and won a series of Pyrrhic victories.

Except for one brief training flight he gave a German pilot in Berlin in June of 1911, Wilbur Wright was not to fly ever again [until his death from typhoid in May 1912], so taken up was he with business matters and acrimonious lawsuits. The Wright Company, from the start, demanded a great deal of time and attention. But it was the interminable patent infringement suits that put the most strain on both brothers. “When we think what we might have accomplished if we had been able to devote this time to experiments,” Wilbur wrote to a friend in France, “we feel very sad, but it is always easier to deal with things than with men, and no one can direct his life entirely as he would choose.

The world took their invention to war numerous times:

It had not gone unnoticed that the secretary of war was another of those who had come to see the demonstrations, and future weapons of war were very much on the minds of the officers at Fort Myer and figured prominently in their conversations. Buoyant with his successes, Orville would write to Wilbur, “Everyone here is very enthusiastic and they all think the machine is going to be of great importance in warfare.” A new book by the popular British novelist H. G. Wells featured a terrifying illustration of New York City in flames after an aerial bombing. “No place is safe—no place is at peace,” wrote Wells. “The war comes through the air, bombs drop in the night. Quiet people go out in the morning, and see the air fleets passing overhead—dripping death, dripping death!”

Orville lived to see, too, the horrific death and destruction wrought by the giant bombers of World War II and in several interviews tried as best he could to speak both for himself and for Wilbur. We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth. But we were wrong. . . . No, I don’t have any regrets about my part in the invention of the airplane, though no one could deplore more than I do the destruction it has caused. I feel about the airplane much the same as I do in regard to fire. That is I regret all the terrible damage caused by fire, but I think it is good for the human race that someone discovered how to start fires and that we have learned how to put fire to thousands of important uses.

 

More: Read The Wright Brothers

Related:

• previous posting on comparing prices and lifestyle then and now using the book as a source