Hugo Byttebier - The Rise of the Flying Machine

Chanute was greatly impressed by Mouillard’s elucidations and this was to have a far-reaching effect on the aviation movement, although that effect was not unequivocally beneficial.

Meanwhile Chanute worked assiduously to sort out the notes on aviation that he had been making since 1855, and which he now arranged for a series of articles that were published in The Railroad and Engineering Journal , starting with the October 1891 issue. The series continued through twenty-seven issues up to January 1894.

As though his voluminous correspondence and his articles were not enough, Chanute had returned from Paris with the intention of organizing an international air conference like the one held in Paris in 1889.

He was assisted in the organization of this new undertaking by a young professor at Notre Dame University, Albert Zahm, who became secretary to the conference. It was held in Chicago from 1 to 4 August 1893 in connection with the Columbian Exposition. It was the third international aeronautical conference after the one held in London in 1868 and the other in Paris in 1889.

The first paper was posthumous. It was a very cogent study, “On the Problem of Aerial Navigation”, written by C. W. Hastings in 1892, shortly before his death at the age of just thirty-three.

Hastings explained that the first requisite of flight was lift and remarked that scientists were willing to admit that “when sufficient progress shall have been made in mechanical science, true aerial navigation will be possible and will be accomplished.” This gainsays the popularly held theory that most scientists at some time or other had declared human flight to be an impossible dream.

Hastings then continued by explaining that the second requisite for a flying machine was stability. “If an apparatus possessed the necessary supporting surface and a sufficient motor and motive instrument to propel it through the air at sufficient speed, yet aerial navigation would be far from accomplished. The machine might still lack stability.” These ideas were clear and concise and were formulated in 1892 by a scientist of great insight.

Hastings proposed the dihedral angle for transverse (lateral) stability and suggested that a vertical keel should be added, explaining that “Such keel cloths may terminate in a vertical rudder and thus allow of steering the machine.” The vertical fixed tailfin for stability and a vertical rudder for steering were here proposed as a combined tail as exists on nearly all modern aeroplanes.

For longitudinal stability Hastings advocated the fixed horizontal Pénaud tail at the rear, but remarked that “it will be somewhat wasteful of power”, which was correct but inevitable. The different methods proposed to obviate this slight waste of power by designing a fixed tail at the front (the so-called canard form) were never able to provide safety equal to the still universally adopted Pénaud system.

There was no mention of lateral control by means of ailerons or similar devices, so that Hastings followed in the footsteps of Sir George Cayley and Alphonse Pénaud when specifying the priorities required of a machine able to carry a human operator.

Many of the papers presented at the conference were dedicated to the intricacies of soaring flight, including several by Frenchmen. Chanute probably translated these himself.

He had also asked Mouillard to contribute, and Mouillard (who lived in Egypt) duly obliged with a paper entitled “A Programme for Safe Experimenting”. Mouillard’s idea of experimenting safely was to use a tailless glider “so designed as to admit of adjusting the wings to the speed of the wind and of thrusting their tips forwards of backwards of the center of gravity so as to change the angle of incidence at which the machine needs the wind”. He duly referred to d’Esterno and Le Bris and repeated his conviction (which he had already propounded in his book of 1881) that: “Ascension can be effected by skillful utilization of the power of the wind and no other force is required.”

In Mouillard’s opinion, one had only to move the tips of the wing forward sufficiently for the machine to be lifted. He also insisted on “powerful means of steering it horizontally” so as always to be able to meet the wind head on. This steering effect was to be obtained by lowering the tip of a wing, as he had already explained in his letter of 20 November 1890.

Chanute had become so intrigued by Mouillard’s supreme confidence and the means he proposed, that he not only assisted Mouillard financially to build a glider (that was never tested) but he also helped him to apply for a patent in the US. Based on his idea of a wing-warping glider, Mouillard’s patent was filed by Chanute on 24 September 1892 and issued on 18 May 1897. Claim 12 clearly covered a soaring machine “having (the wing’s) rear edge free from the (main) frame of the wing and cords attached to said rear edge for pulling it downward”.

Another renowned contributor was S. P. Langley who, although not committed to the unstable soaring machine, as his future activities would show, had become interested in finding a reason for the problem that still appeared inexplicable to many: why a bird could remain in the air with outstretched and unmoving wings for long periods of time without losing height. The solution Langley had found was condensed in the title of the paper he submitted, “The Internal Force of the Wind”. Although it was an interesting theory it was not the correct one.

A similar theory was offered by Zahm in a paper that sought to explain the problem by the existence of windgusts, whilst the Frenchman Bretonnière ventured the theory that the heat of the sun was the moving force and in this he was much nearer the mark.

Lilienthal contributed with parts of an article about his glides of 1892 and the Austrian Wilhelm Kress was also at hand with a theory of his own. Additionally, one of the oldest theorists of fixed-wing flight, Charles de Louvrié, contributed a paper about “The Theory of Soaring Flight”.

De Louvrié, who had written his first paper about aeroplane-type flight nearly thirty years before, again hit the mark by indicating the ascending wind as the principal cause of the horizontal flightpath of the great soaring birds and he added the keen observation that: “Such a thing as a horizontal wind hardly exists, we need but to watch the whirling of dry leaves in Autumn”. De Louvrié had proposed fixed-wing flight at a time when very few people believed in it and his paper at Chanute’s Congress was his swansong before his death the following year.

Another pioneer who was experimenting with gliders was J. J. Montgomery, who discussed various theories on soaring flight; and from Britain there was an article submitted by B. F. Baden Powell entitled “The Action of a Bird’s Wing”.

The most interesting papers, however, were presented by those who were busy working with kites and who necessarily were confronted by the overriding quest for stability. The most important of these papers was read by Lawrence Hargrave. This Australian researcher had progressed from flapping-wing to fixed-wing aeroplane models, and in 1892 had started a series of experiments on supporting surfaces to find out how lift and stability could be obtained with the least possible expenditure of power.

He experimented with a series of kites until he hit on the famous box kite, which was an inherently stable construction. Hargrave thereupon committed himself enthusiastically to the achievement of inherent stability. In the biplane box kite construction Hargrave turned to Wenham for inspiration, and he explained that he had not found additional support in the use of a second superposed wing but had accepted the results obtained by Langley in 1889 on an experimental biplane construction.