Willis Abbot - Aircraft and Submarines

In America we like to think of the brothers Wright as being the true inventors of the airplane. And indeed they did first bring it to the point of usefulness, and alone among the many pioneers lived to see the adoption of their device by many nations for serious practical use. But it would be unjust to claim for them entire priority in the field of the glider and the heavier-than-air machine. Professor Langley preceded them with an airplane which, dismissed with ridicule as a failure in his day, was long after his death equipped with a lighter motor and flown by Glenn Curtis, who declared that the scientist had solved the problem, had only the explosive engine been perfected in his time.

Despite, however, the early period of the successful experiments of the Wrights and Professor Langley, it would be unjust for America to arrogate to herself entire priority in airplane invention. Any story of that achievement which leaves out Lilienthal, the German, and Pilcher, the Englishman, is a record in which the truth is subordinated to national pride.

Otto Lilienthal and his brother Gustav – the two like the Wrights were always associated in their aviation work – had been studying long the problem of flight when in 1889 they jointly published their book Bird Flight as the Basis of the Flying Art . Their investigations were wholly into the problem of flight without a motor. At the outset they even harked back to the long-abandoned theory that man could raise himself by mere muscular effort, and Otto spent many hours suspended at the end of a rope flapping frantically a pair of wings before he abandoned this effort as futile. Convinced that the soaring or gliding of the birds was the feat to emulate, he made himself a pair of fixed, bat-like wings formed of a light fabric stretched over a willow frame. A tail composed of one vertical and one horizontal plane extended to the rear, and in the middle the aviator hung by his armpits, in an erect position. With this device he made some experimental glides, leaping from slight eminences. With his body, which swung at will from its cushioned supports, he could balance, and even steer the fabric which supported him, and accomplished long glides against the wind. Not infrequently, running into the teeth of the breeze down a gentle slope he would find himself gently wafted into the air and would make flights of as much as three hundred yards, steering to either side, or rising and falling at will. He was even able to make a circuitous flight and return to his starting place – a feat that was not accomplished with a motor-driven airplane until years later. Lilienthal achieved it with no mechanical aid, except the wings. He became passionately devoted to the art, made more than two thousand flights, and at the time of his death had just completed a motor-driven airplane, which he was never able to test. His earlier gliding wings he developed into a form of biplane, with which he made several successful flights, but met his death in 1896 by the collapse of this machine, of the bad condition of which he had been warned.

Lilienthal was more of a factor in the conquest of the air than his actual accomplishments would imply. His persistent experiments, his voluminous writings, and above all his friendly and intelligent interest in the work of other and younger men won him a host of disciples in other lands who took up the work that dropped from his lifeless hands.

In England Percy S. Pilcher emulated the Lilienthal glides, and was at work on a motor-propelled machine when he was killed by the breakage of a seemingly unimportant part of his machine. He was on the edge of the greater success, not to that moment attained by anyone, of building a true airplane propelled by motor. Many historians think that to Lilienthal and Pilcher is justly due the title "the first flying men." But Le Bris, a French sailor, utterly without scientific or technical equipment, as far back as 1854 had accomplished a wonderful feat in that line. While on a cruise he had watched an albatross that followed his ship day after day apparently without rest and equally without fatigue. His imagination was fired by the spectacle and probably having never heard of the punishment that befell the Ancient Mariner, he shot the albatross. "I took the wing," he wrote later, "and exposed it to the breeze, and lo, in spite of me, it drew forward into the wind; notwithstanding my resistance it tended to rise. Thus I had discovered the secret of the bird. I comprehend the whole mystery of flight."

A trifle too sanguine was sailor Le Bris, but he had just the qualities of imagination and confidence essential to one who sets forth to conquer the air. Had he possessed the accurate mind, the patience, and the pertinacity of the Wrights he might have beaten them by half a century. As it was he accomplished a remarkable feat, though it ended in somewhat laughable failure. He built an artificial bird, on the general plan of his albatross. The wings were not to flap, but their angles to the wind were controlled by a system of levers controlled by Le Bris, who stood up in the basket in the centre. To rise he required something like the flying start which the airplanes of to-day get on their bicycle wheels before leaving the ground. As Le Bris had no motor this method of propulsion was denied him, so he loaded the apparatus in a cart, and fastened it to the rail by a rope knotted in a slip knot which a jerk from him would release. As they started men walked beside the cart holding the wings, which extended for twenty-five feet on either side. As the horses speeded up these assistants released their hold. Feeling the car try to rise under his feet Le Bris cast off the rope, tilted the front end of the machine, and to his joy began to rise steadily into the air. The spectators below cheered madly, but a note of alarm mingled with their cheers, and the untried aviator noticed a strange and inexplicable jerking of his machine. Peering down he discovered, to his amaze, a man kicking and crying aloud in deadly fear. It was evident that the rope he had detached from the cart had caught up the driver, who had thus become, to his intense dismay, a partner in the inventor's triumph. Indeed it is most possible that he contributed to that triumph for the ease and steadiness with which the machine rose to a height estimated at three hundred feet suggests that he may have furnished needed ballast – acted in fact as the tail to the kite. Humanity naturally impelled Le Bris to descend at once, which he did skilfully without injuring his involuntary passenger, and only slightly breaking one of the wings.

Had Le Bris won this success twenty years later his fame and fortune would have been secure. But in 1854 the time was not ripe for aeronautics. Le Bris was poor. The public responded but grudgingly to his appeals for aid. His next experiment was less successful – perhaps for lack of the carter – and he ultimately disappeared from aviation to become an excellent soldier of France.

Perhaps had they not met with early and violent deaths, the Lilienthals and Pilcher might have carried their experiments in the art of gliding into the broader domain of power flight. This however was left to the two Americans, Orville and Wilbur Wright, who have done more to advance the art of navigating the air than all the other experimenters whose names we have used. The story of the Wright brothers is one of boyhood interest gradually developed into the passion of a lifetime. It parallels to some degree the story of Santos-Dumont who insisting as a child that "man flies" finally made it a fact. The interest of the Wrights was first stimulated when, in 1878, their father brought home a small toy, called a "helicopter," which when tossed in the air rose up instead of falling. Every child had them at that time, but curiously this one was like the seed which fell upon fertile soil. The boys went mad, as boys will, on the subject of flying. But unlike most boys they nurtured and cultivated the passion and it stayed with them to manhood. From helicopters they passed to kites, and from kites to gliders. By calling they were makers and repairers of bicycles, but their spare time was for years devoted to solving the problem of flight. In time it became their sole occupation and by it they won a fortune and world-wide fame. Their story forms a remarkable testimony to the part of imagination, pertinacity, and courage in winning success. After years of tests with models, and with kites controlled from the ground, the brothers had worked out a type of glider which they believed, in a wind of from eighteen to twenty miles an hour, would lift and carry a man. But they had to find a testing ground. The fields near their home in Ohio were too level, and their firm unyielding surface was not attractive as a cushion on which to light in the event of disaster. Moreover the people round about were getting inquisitive about these grown men "fooling around" with kites and flying toys. To the last the Wrights were noted for their dislike of publicity, and it is entirely probable that the sneering criticisms of their "level headed" and "practical" neighbours had a good deal to do with rooting them in this distaste.