JF Ptak Science Books

Floating Mines of the Air (1939)

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 This thrilling nail-biter from the near future appeared in Popular Mechanics for December 1939.  What we are seeing floated here (sorry/terrible) was a system of relatively primitive helium-filled air mines to guard against enemy attack from the air.  There was no doubt the (fighting) end of the European and British part of WWII there would be a very major role played by aircraft. Bombing had already been introduced on a larger scale with German practice and assistance to Franco in Spain, and of course there was plenty of evidence for air power in the crushing of Poland just a few months earlier beginning 1 September and ending 26 days later--a victory and a defeat that shocked the military world. So much of the world had entered into war in the first two weeks of September 1939, and of course the U.S.  reacted with predictable strong sentiments for isolationism.

I remember a headline--can't place where--reading it, years ago, announcing that the Olympic Games for 1940--that were to be held in Soviet-attacked Finland--were cancelled.

There was a simple idea behind the aerial minefield--take 5' diameter balloons, fill them with helium, attach a 40' line to it on one end with a bomb with 4 lbs of high explosive on the other; send them aloft, and then wait for a plane to hook one of the lines with a wing or tail or something. These were to be sent aloft by the hundreds if not thousands. Maybe this could work, I dunno--but what comes to mind is what happens with the hundreds of balloons that didn't have something run into it?  They bomb would explode on contact, so at some point, they're all going to come down... There'd that, plus what if fighter planes came in before the bombers (once the Germans were close enough that is) and simply shot down the balloons? I imagine that they'd be used over rural areas where there could be some absorption of hundreds of falling failing bombs. Anyway, this idea seems a little problematic.    

The USAF "Flying Saucer" Prototype (1954)

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Appearing as a splashy double-page spread in LIFE magazine for May 31, 1954 is the great “Project Y” USAF flying saucer. It was the continuation of the work carried out by John C.M. Frost (1915-1979) who was a superior engineer who worked for de Haviland and Avro Canada, and who continued his VTOL work with the Air Force under the “Project Y”. This aircraft was to fly 1500-2000 mph and have a 1500 mile range. Of course, this particular aircraft didn't get very far for Frost, a person with numerous successes, but it did experience some fair amount of attention.

A Double Dose of Dirigibles

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There's nothing quite so satisfying as seeing a representation of quantitative data where the graphical displays are flying.  "One Dreadnought Buys 52 Dirigibles and 235 Aeroplanes" is a full-page diagram appearing in the 3 June 1911 issue of the Illustrated London News , making a very strong point that in the new age of aviation the 2 million pounds it would cost to produce one battleship could also (or rather) buy a lot of aircraft. 

You may notice that the ship is flying a U.S. flag--this is because the graphic appear a month or so earlier in the U. S. publication Scientific American, and the ILN is simply reprinting the info  In any event the image enumerates U.S. and international aircraft, making for a lovely representation of a broad range of airplanes filling up the same sky. 

A World of Untranslatable Colors and no Color Vocabulary (1638)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2837

There was something that caught my eye as I paged through an online copy of Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales (1638), something beside this work being about the first English language trip to the Moon. There were other earlier trips made to our friendly neighbor before Godwin (whose work was published posthumously) like the late Greek Lucian first century ACE).  And there were contemporaries who wrote in other languages, like Cyrano and Kepler (Somnium, 1638); Aphra Behn’s farce (The Emperor of the Moon 1687) and Margaret Cavendish  (The Blazing World 1688); and John Wilkins (The Diversity of a World in the Moon, (1638) to name a few...and then there's the wide world of the plurality of worlds, like the wonderful Fontenelle...and of course later there were trips to the Moon made by Verne and Wells, and so on.

Godwin's book is short and quick, deceptively simple but not so—there's a bit of introduction where we are shown a little bit of the influence of Galileo's Sidereus (1610), and the frontis depicts the flying machine by which the intrepid traveler, Senior Gonsales flies off to the Moon. This is a craft powered by a sort of wild swan, which struggles mightily to free itself of the Gilbertian great magnet, but once free of that, the “flight” took twelve days. Our traveler may also be the first one to get to the Moon by accident: he flees a fiasco in which he kills someone in a duel winds up in St. Helena, and then has a problem with the British fleet off Tenerife, from which he flies off again with his bird machine...he hadn't intended to go to the Moon, but that is what happened.  

Here's what I found so interesting: once he gets there, Gonsales tries to describe clothing and—even more fascinating—he tries to find words for colors that he has never seen before. Marvelous.

“[T]heir colour and countenance [was] most pleasing, and their habit such, as I know not how to expresse. For neither did I see any kind of Cloth, Silke, or other stuffe to resemble the matter of that whereof their clothes were made; neither … can I devise how to describe the colour of them ….

It was neither blacke, nor white, yellow, nor redde, greene nor blew, nor any colour composed of these.

But if you ask me what it was then; I must tell you, it was a colour never seen in our earthly world, and therefore neither to be described unto us by any, nor to be conceived…. Only this I can say of it, that it was the most glorious and delightfull, that can possibly be…."

And that, I'm afraid, is where I left off. As I've said elsewhere on this blog I only give each one of these post an hour's time maximum, and after my fumbling around in the Godwin, I'm about at my limit. This much-studied book deserves a lot more than what I can give it here in 700 words, but this will have to do for now, for me. The bottom line here is that I don't think that I've ever read anything by anyone before, say, 1920 and the real birth of the sci fi genre (with which I'm am not very familiar) that tries to describe a color that was without description. 

[Image source: Wikipedia Commons.]

Oh, before I go, Godwin also introduces us to the imaginary language of the Lunarians, which he describes as being beautiful, and very expansive, as the vocabulary can change given its tone. (He also notes that only one language is spoken on the Moon, which he credits as an advantage over the terrestrial polyglot.) This is also part of a long history of imaginary languages in early literature (for example, More's Utopia and Rabelais' Gargantua...)  The Lunar world is a Utopia, and evidently part of that blissful state is maintained by trading out ill-behaved Lunarian children with well-behaved children of Earth. 

Non-Silhouette Silhouettes and Dirigible Mooring Masts (1930)

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Just a very quick entry here on some interesting and arresting images relating to flight, all from the July-December 1930 volume of Popular Mechanics. The first is a full-page illustration for October (1930) showing an improved method for anchoring dirigibles--in this case, for demonstration purposes, it is His Majesty's Airship airship R-100, which was over 700' long and moved along at about 80 mph, and was less than a year old. Unfortunately, this protocol for moving though the air was nearly exhausted--it was fateful for this note on the mooring masts appeared in October as this was the month of the R-101 disaster, which effectively brought the end of the R-100, which was scrapped soon afterwards.  

• "Sketch of Latest Type pf Mooring Mast for Dirigibles, Showing the Lights, Tackle and Winches Used in Bringing a Big Airship to Anchor: Note the Ground lights That Indicate the Direction of Wind ..." 

The other image of aviation interest is a chart of airplane types and how to identify them in silhouette--except that they are not in silhouette. Still it is a handy chat, and I reproduce it here:

A 10,000-Ton Aircraft from the Future of 1934

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Hugo Gernsback--(1884-1967)  the very busily creative pioneer in science fiction, author, and editor of some of the finest sci fi, pre-sci fi, and pop science journals from the 'teens into the 1940's—though big and very heavy in this consideration of a future flier. The aircraft seems to be enormous, though about the only spec given here is that it would weight 10,000 tons, and that it would probably appear by 1952, if not sooner.

That's a lot of tons to be thinking about being airborne, back there in 1934. To put things in perspective the Boeing 747 weighs in at 370 tons (give or take), which nattily works out that it would take 370 747s to equal the weight of the monster Gernsback was thinking about.

This bit of speculation is found in the page of Everyday Science and Mechanics (Nov/Dec issue for 1934), with Gernsback reasoning for such a spectacular aircraft being based on a logical progression of heavier-than-air aircraft sizes:

“The tendency at the present time in airplane building is toward constantly increasing size. It is probably realized by all who have concerned themselves with aircraft that the larger machines are not very far in the future. From the earliest Wright airplane, which weighed approximately 1/2 ton, to the present record holder, the DOX, which weighed fifty tons, took a period of some 26 years. The 10,000 ton airplane, projected on a like time-scale, would, therefore, make its appearance not later than the year 1952. However, with the nature of the present-day technique, it is quite possible, at this moment, that the 10,000 ton plane will be here much sooner.”

Or not.

That brings us to the other bit of specification mentioned in the article—the tail propeller on this aircraft was 75', so, using that as a measuring device the plane was about 600'x 600' and about 150' tall. The aircraft's mission was basically like that of an ocean liner, though flying. I guess stripped down it would have made an excellent troop transport, being capable of flying in, what, a vast amount of materiel as well as probably 2-3,000 troops.

This aircraft still classifies as a mega-behemoth, and there hasn't been anything in the air (as a heavier-than-air aircraft) that comes anywhere close to this.

 

Nazi Propaganda Against the B-17 (1943)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2824

This is quite the piece of anti-U.S. Propaganda, printed in 1943 and targeted so to speak against the B-17 Flying Fortress. (I'm not sure why this is in French, though no doubt it was focused on occupied territories in France and Belgium and other areas reached by Lingua Franca.) This was a difficult piece to work through given my tender spot for this aircraft--I've long admired it, and was even a passenger on one many years ago (it was much louder than I expected). As a piece of propaganda I would have expected to see more copies of this here and there, but as it turns out there is only one copy (at Nanterres) located by WorldCat--this in mind I've reproduced the whole of the very short work.

[Front and rear covers.]

The little pamphlet got to business straightaway, claiming on the back of the title page that the “Flying Fortress” suffered terribly at (“terrorist raid”) Schweinfurt—true enough for the 8^th Air Force, though the numbers aren't quite right. The author tells us that the “Flying Fortress” was actually “the Flying Coffin”. “This is how the Americans call their heavy four-engine lighters [the “Flying Fortress”]. The harsh reality, the inexorable practice of fighting has long since given them another name: that of flying coffins. C'est ainsi aue les americains appelent leurs bombrdiers lourds quadrimoteurs. la dure realite, l'inexorable practique des combats leur a depuis longtemps fqit attribuer un autre nom: celui de cercueils volantes.”)

In the explosive scene on the page there's a picture of mass destruction of B-17's being blown out of the sky—this a result of the (“tight”) formation flying that the writer says used to be a strength, but now with new (German) weapons would prove to be the 17's weakness. (“The greater the function, the bigger their devastation.”)

The next scene, a two-pager, is heartbreaking and brutal. “Voila ce qui les attend” it shouts--”this is what awaits them”! And then, boldly beneath the scene, the pamphlet repeats the Flying Fortress is the Flying Coffin claim.

A Short Notice on Some Short but Very Important Flights--the Wrights, 1902

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2823

Here's an interesting piece of reporting by (Professor) Raimund Nimfuhr (Czech, 1874-1954) on the Wright brothers gliding experiments in late September/October 1902.  The two men transported their 1902 aircraft to Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk , N.C., and carried out between 700 and 1000 gliding tests, with great success. This story on their efforts appeared a few months later on 5 March 1903 in the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig), with an unusual accompaniment of five photographs.  

The Wright's received very circumspect coverage during this time, what with the certain level of disbelief that accompanied early reports on flight. As it turns out when the brothers made their great and historic powered flight a year and two months later the local papers near the Wright community in Ohio gave the achievement scant notice.  The reverential Scientific American gave the Wright flight an inside notice—it wasn’t front cover material for them. (The papers were a little shorted though because the results of the experiment were leaked to the local Norfolk paper, and the rest of the world got scooped.)

In this short notice, “The latest advances in practical flying art”, Nimfuhr takes the first two paragraphs to review a bit of aviation history and to remark that “practical activity in flying has become increasingly common”, with a “feverish activity” particular to the “New World”. He states that the importance of Otto Lilienthal had not yet been recognized for what it was, with Europeans paying the price in wasted experimentation for not employing Lilienthal's results—this he states is not the case in the New World, which has made good use of the Lilienthal experimentation.

When he gets to the den Bruden Wright, Nimfuhr starts by saying that their 1902 glider was almost exactly like that of the second type of Octave Chanute, though he almost immediately states that the Wright machine was a “brand new, significantly improved machine”. He describes the wings and the method of controlling die gleilfluge, and then on th=o a description of some of he “700” flights they made, the longest being 189 metres (with time aloft at 26 seconds). Nimfuhr does take great care to describe the exacting control the Wrights had on the glider, which “promptly obeyed the slightest movement of the rudder”. He ends saying that the Wright glider is not the “ideal”, and that in order to fly several kilometers or into a headwind, an engine was necessary, though as things were in March 1903 the Wrights had made a “very significant advance”.

An 8,000-mile Cruising Range Flying Wing, 1943

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This is not the first appearance of a proposed "flying wing", though it seems to me that it is one of the biggest. This version—the idea of Horace Chapman Young (of the Aerodynamic Research Corporation) and Eric Langlands—appeared in the pages of Popular Science magazine in February 1943. It is a “combination of airship and airplane”, and was filled with helium and hope. It is also 69' tall, and 250 feet long (!), one version of the aircraft of which was made to handle an airport of 12 planes on a 180'x200' airstrip, which brings just that part f the plane in at a little under a half acre. It pulled and pushed itself through the air at a not-blazing 30-75mph—however, it was supposed to keep that speed for a cruising time of 270 hours, which is enormous. I like the idea of this beautiful beast, from its slightly manta-ray face down to its 30mph takeoff speed.

 

Found-Abstract Art and the Coming of the NCC-1701: the Capazza Lenticular Airship, 1909

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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

Atlas of the Engines--the Antoinette Aero Motor, 1908

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I couldn't but help to share this terrific advertisement found in the page of Aerophile magazine for 1908 (via the "Unbound" section of the Smithsonian Institution and Internet Archive. This is the famous "Antoinette" engine, designed and construction by Leon Levavasseur in an aircraft-building partnership with  Jules Gastambide (whose daughter's name became that of the series of engines). As you can see the man supporting the engine is not having an easy time of it (assuming the guy is 5'8" 150 lbs or so), though this was a far-advanced aircraft engine for the day, a V-16 (?) developing 100- horse (the Wright's 1903 engine was 12hp 180lbs but did its job perfectly).  In any event this was an interesting demonstration of comparative lightness and power, delivered in January, 1908.  (I'm reasonably sure that this is not the 40hp engine of the Farman flight...)

Source: https://archive.org/details/larophile16besa/page/28)

Plans of Major Aircraft, 1908

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This interesting illustrations shows the plans of 16 different aircraft and the triumph of aviation in the scant five years since the Wright brothers' successful first powered flight in 1903.  From left-to-right and top-to-bottom the designer/builder reads: Wright, Farman, Santos Dumont, Cornu, de la Vaux, Bleriot, Apferer, Bleriot (again), Dufaux, Delagrange, Farman, Bazin, Langly, Brequet, and Esnault-Peletrie.  The image is found in Nature, 1908, vol 78, pp 668-672.

There's a lot in this article but what I focused on was the shot across the bow to the Brits, the author taking issue with their capacities, and telling them to go and get some better maths (or someone better than them to do the thinking and work the numbers): "The recent flights show what can be done in aviation by a person possessed of skill and experience. They are a necessary factor in the development of artificial flight. The problem is quite in a different position from what it was a year ago. But if flying machines are to be made accessible to the million, the sooner English aeronauts learn mathematics or get someone to do the mathematics the better. At the present time a great deal of rubbish passes off as mathematics which is quite unworthy of the name..."

 

A Guide to German Trenches and Aircraft, 1915

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WWI was into its sixth (of fifty-one) months of war when these helpful graphics appeared in the pages of the Illustrated London News on Feb 6, 1915.  Distinguishing trenches was interesting though not very essential, and certainly not as potentially useful to the broad population as the sheet identifying German aircraft. This image is a version of a poster that was distributed far and wide in Great Britain and France teaching ordinary citizens the differences between airplanes of friend and foe. There were a large number of designs of aircraft,especially so when you threw the British and French planes into the mix. It certainly would've been a bit involved at first to make these distinctions, though if your survival depended on perhaps knowing the differences in all of these aircraft then no doubt the learning curve would flatten out. It is also remarkable that all of these developments in aviation come just a dozen years after the Wright brothers first made their powered flight at Kill Devil Hills.  

• Both images are clickable and greatly expandable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Massive Triple Tandem Triplane (1921)

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What we see here, below, is a rather extraordinary flying machine, a mammoth beast with 8,000 square feet of wings (more than 40% greater than that of a 747). It was a triple tandem triplane, which is a glorious-sounding and possibly epic description of the aircraft—a plane with three independent triplanes fixed to one fuselage. The article appears in Popular Mechanics for May 1921, and describes this aeronautical attempt as the work of Giovanni (Gianni) Caproni (1886-1957), which was to be a transport for 300-mile round trip excursions at about 80mph cruising speed. It was powered by 8 12 cylinder 400 hp Liberty engines operating on push/pull arrangements on different wings, carrying a crew of eight and 100 passengers. Unfortunately the flying boat crashed on its second test flight, and then the remains were towed badly toward shore, and that was the end of the plane.

 

Flying to India from London at 93 mph (1928)

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These oblique cross-section and cutaways have been near-and-dear imagery for a long time, and I've probably made 50+ posts on this blog sharing them. This drawing is by S.W. Clatgworthy and appears in Popular Mechanics for March, 1928-- it depicts the not-identified and brand-new "Short S.8 Calcutta", which made its first flight the month before.  The airplane was designed for the Mediterranean leg of the London-India service of British Imperial Airways (1924-1939 when it merged into BOAC and then in 1974 became British Airways) and was the first stressed skinned metal hulled flying boat, and was constructed by Shorts¹. Its three Bristol Jupiter engines pulled the aircraft along at about a 100 mph cruising speed, which no doubt made for an exciting and relatively fast (by 1928 standards) trip to the East.  The aircraft was pretty large for the day: 66' long with a wingspan of 93' and a height of 23'. It was probably noisy but relatively comfortable, the passengers being served food and drinks by a steward. Far less comfy were the pilot and navigator, who as you can see were in an open cockpit. 

Notes:

1. Shorts was the firm started by the Short brothers in Battersea in 1908 and which was the first aircraft manufacturing company to make production airplanes.