JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Here's another early aviation post, as I seem to be a little stuck this morning in the 1908-1911 period...or suitably enough down a small rabbit hole to keep me from doing my mailing duties. This is a fascinating period with tremendous steps forward in technology taking place just five years after the first successful Wright powered flight test--it is hard to imagine the Wrights were roundly ridiculed in their efforts and worked for the most part in deep privacy; and yet here, just 1500 days or so later, there are hundreds of aeronauts and a dozen or so journals devoted to tech aspects of flight.
What caught my Star Trekian eye here in this May 1908 article in l'Aerophile was the lovely found-abstract plans for supporting the envelope of Louis Capazza's lenticular airship, a composite balloon/aircraft. The firm of Adolphe Bayard-Clement was the planned producer of the airship (they were the first to go into general production of an airplane, the Santos-Dumont Demoiselle 19) though it never was built. It was certainly intriguing--it was lighter than air, non-symmetrical, top be powered by three 120 hp engines supplying power to three screws fore and aft--it was lovely in its way, and of course given it plan and profile immediately suggests to me the Starship Enterprise, though I may be alone in that.
And here's the Found-Abstract art end of the deal--the structure for the non-symmetrical support for the balloon/plane envelope:
Tech info (and image source, above) see Berget, Conquest of the Air, 1909, pp 183-186.
Images sources (below): https://archive.org/details/larophile16besa/page/182
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