Aeroplanes? In a War?

THOMAS MOY AND HIS AERIAL STEAMER

Towards conquering gravity by machine rather than gas bag, most of the practical work was done between 1891 and 1905. Before that, there were always people wanting to imitate birds, flapping wings in an effort to fly, and as long ago as 1799 came the first theoretical description of the kind of machine people would need, if they were ever to be able to fly usefully.

Sir George Cayley, 1773–1857, Yorkshire baronet, lord of the manor of Brompton-by-Sawdon in the North Riding near Scarborough, set out the basic principles at that time and in a more detailed paper published in 1809. He understood that we should have to replace flapping wings with fixed ones, and that flying surfaces would need to be curved to produce sufficient lift to overcome the drag, that is, the combined weight of the flying machine, plus its burden of aeronauts, plus its motive force, an engine. Steam engines, he said, would never do, but some new sort of engine would be required, so that forward motion could generate the aforementioned lift and the craft could journey purposefully from A to B.

Without a suitable engine, Sir George built several gliders that worked, one of which was supposedly piloted by his coachman in 1853 down Brompton Dale, but the quest continued for powered flight.

Sir George's opinion on steam power did not deter two other Englishmen, William Henson and John Stringfellow. They patented their airliner in 1842 – The Aerial Steam Carriage – and founded their airline, The Aerial Transit Company, 'to convey letters, goods and passengers from place to place through the air'. Through their appeals for investment in the company they hoped to raise the money to build the machine but, for some reason, investors did not rush forward. All that ever came of it was a short indoor flight of a scale model but, credit where it is due, the thing did fly, and it was steam-powered.

There was a lot of publicity engendered by Henson and Stringfellow, doubtless stirring interest in a young clerk in a London stationery firm, Thomas Moy (1823–1910). Like many other pioneers, Moy knew what the problem was. You only have to see a piece of paper blowing along the street to realise that a lightweight, flattish object can fly, but how do you control that and make that flight useful?

Moy started, again like many others, by watching birds. In the 1860s he made some model 'wings', attached them to a body, and towed the device like a little submarine under the still waters of a canal, to study how the currents flowed around the components. To his surprise, his experiment was ruined when his bird-boat surfaced; he had, without realising it, invented the hydrofoil.

He joined the newly formed Aeronautical Society of Great Britain (later the Royal Aeronautical Society), gave a paper on his conclusions regarding the seemingly effortless soaring flight of the albatross, and he designed a flying machine. Unlike Henson and Stringfellow, he built it.

Rather than wait for the engineers working on internal combustion to come up with a practical answer, Moy decided to ignore Sir George. The Aerial Steamer, with a lightweight engine developed by Richard Shill running on meths, made its debut at the Crystal Palace in July 1875 (only one year before the four-stroke petrol engine appeared). It had no pilot and was tethered, in the manner that aeromodellers call round-the-pole, and its wing, made of bamboo and linen, had a span of 14 feet. With its raised tailplane, today's readers might be reminded of the Starship Enterprise. Its inventor estimated that, to lift off, warp speed needed to be 35mph on its 2,000-yard circular track. Despite a really clever engine design, giving it over 500rpm, the Steamer only managed 12 mph, partly because its own motion caused the fumes from the three forward meths burners to blow out the other three.

Thomas Moy had built his machine out of his own limited funds and could not raise any more. He tried turning the Steamer into a kind of helicopter, which didn't work, but he did make a small aircraft, a model, that could take off under its own power provided by rubber bands. Such a take-off, without any kind of extra launching, was a significant feat for its time but, like steam, rubber would never do.

OTTO LILIENTHAL AND HIS HANG GLIDER

The next idea to give a real boost to flying-machine development came from Germany around 1891, curiously enough by a return to the birdman strategy. Otto Lilienthal and his brother Gustav made a pair of wings to fit on a man's arms, as so many had before, but with a major difference. Otto, agreeing with Sir George on curvature but not on fixedness, had realised that the wings had to be convex above, concave beneath. He made hundreds of flights in birdman mode and began to develop more sophisticated machines.

By 1895, he was sitting in an aircraft that would be easily recognisable to hang-glider pilots today. It had a tail with plane and fin (see patent diagram), and it would fly when launched from the top of a hill carrying a chap in a Tyrolean hat.

Lilienthal published several papers, usually to little effect. Some official attitudes could be summed up as 'Man will never fly', while others stated that man would only fly if he could work out how to do it with flat wings. Lilienthal sent his ideas to Hureau de Villeneuve, president of a French scientific commission investigating the possibilities of aeronautics, who wrote back from Paris:

I consider wings, pre-eminently, as moving organs for propelling at great speed, and when this speed has been reached the force necessary for supporting may be neglected. I have shown this by constructing mechanical birds with flat wings which fly very fast and keep themselves up very well when flying in the air. I try to make the wings true planes as far as I can, for the flatter they are the greater is the speed attained.

Lilienthal refused to join the flat-wing society and continued to publish his own ideas. In 1893 he wrote: 'Even to the present hour the majority of aviators expend much painful effort in attempting the hopeless task of trying to fly with flat wings.'

From the same paper, published in Zeitschrift für Luftschiffahrt (Journal of Aviation, literally 'airship travel' but meaning all types of aerial vessel) by Deutsche Verein zur Förderung der Luftschiffahrt (German Society for the Advancement of Aviation):

I have now reached the close of a series of experiments during which I had set myself a definite task. This was to construct an apparatus with curved carrying surfaces which should enable me to sail through the air, starting from high points and gliding as far as possible, that is to say, at the least obtainable inclination; and to do this with stability and safety even in winds of medium strength.

He succeeded in gliding but knew full well that this was only the beginning.

The mere discovery that with arched wings supporting forces are evolved which permit...