JF Ptak Science Books

Invading England with 50,000 Planes (1908)

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2764

Some of the most striking things in my collection/store/accumulation are the hundreds of images that portray data for display purposes--even more so, those that use a vernacular setting to put some anthropomorphic breath into a statistic.

The print that we're looking at here appeared in the 19 December 1908  issue of The Illustrated London News and is entitled "The Futility of Herr Rudolf Martin's¹ Plan of Invasion by Aeroplane", and reports on a possible German invasion scenario of Great Britain that was delivered in Berlin on 2 October 1908. This fantastic piece of  artwork by Hermanus Willem Koekkoek (1867-1929) graphically depicts what the author maintained was the impossibility of a German force to invade England by landing 50,000 flying machines and 100,000 men on the Kentish coast of England--undoable because "of the impossibility of finding landing-room (for the planes) and cover for an army on aeroplanes. The artist depicts a small town and what I guesstimate to be 60 planes in the air and 75 or so on the ground, leaving it to the imagination of the reader where the other 49,875 might go. He DOES make a point, and very vividly. 

"Nothing could show better the futility of Government Councillor Rudolf Martin's idea that Germany could construct 50,000 flying machines for 50-million pounds...and land 100,000 men on the Kentish coast from Calais within half an hour." I would imagine that this illustration drove the point home to the folks who didn't actually bother to read anything about the Martin defense plan. (It was in a similar way that Thomas Nast was able to control public opinion and sway political refuge and protection away from Boss Tweed. Tweed famously boasted that he didn't care what the newspapers said about him because his power base didn't read--he might've been and probably was correct here, so Nast took after Tweed via the political cartoon, and big too, and frequently; and the cartoons, even if the people looking at them couldn't read, told the whole story graphically, and it was this that brought an end to Tweed more than anything else.)

In 1908 Martin gave an interview to the Daily Mail in which he outlined another plan by which he felt Germany could launch 3,500 "specially design" airships (I'm guessing dirigibles) and land 350,000 (!) men in England in a half-hour. This evidently whipped itself into a frothy aeroplanitis in 1909, despite such efforts as this graphical reasoning by the ILN to dispense with the unreasonable fears.

The airplane flown by the Wrights (the first powered heavier-than-air flight) occurred barely six years prior to these frantic events.  Their invention was still fresh (and basically "foreign", as the Brits lagged well behind the other major powers in flight until WWI) and understandable in a way that the fears were not understandable, not really, because of the newness and exotic aspect of the possibly-threatening invention. Also it should be noted that the first heavier-than-air airplane crossing of the Channel didn't take place until the next year, by Louis Bleriot, who claimed a 1000-pound prize for being the first to do so. The first passenger wasn't taken across until 1910, and the first airship didn't make a flight across until 1915. So no doubt Martin was looking into a far off future, except that the planes were still mostly of Wright design. 

• For a tour of the chronological history of the graphical representation of quantitative data as well as innovations in statistical and representational cartography, please have a look at Michael Friendly's fantastic work at York University https://datavis.ca/milestones/index.php?group=1900%2B--it is an historical site the way it should be done, complete with all the trimmings, as well as the usually-absent but very important citations to the original articles used in the chronology. 

Notes:

1. I don't know much about Mr. Martin at all except that in Richard P. Hallion's Taking Flight, Inventing the Aerial Age, from Antiquity to the First.... (pg 298) we find Martin being mentioned among other "popular authors" as Verne, Wells, Kipling, and Fawcett as being somewhat responsible for forming the perception of future flight. Martin was also the president of the German Airship League and author of The Coming War in the Air.

 

Bad Places to Be (continued)

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I used to think that the belly gunner (in a ball turret) in a B-17 (or B-25, or PB4Y-1) was about the most dangerous/wrenching position to be in an aircraft. Here's another, slightly earlier version of that, s cringeworthy effort without the protection that went along for the gunners in those other aircraft: 

[Source: http://www.magazineart.org/main.php/v/technical/modernmechanix/ModernMechanix1932-09.jpg.html]

This is from Modern Mechanix for October, 1932--that's a date I needed to check out because the position of this gunner looked so treacherous and exposed.

In the same vein is this stone-cold illustration found in the January 1917 issue of Popular Mechanics. This was just a bad place to be: in a 14'-long bomb-like aluminum casing, hanging from a 3000' 3/8" cable suspended from a Zeppelin, trying to relay the positions of whatever you could find, and with people shooting at you. At least, though, the observer had a woolen mattress on which to lie (so says the caption).

Thayer's "New Navigable War Balloon" and Mutually Assured Destruction, (1885)

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Here's a rather Jules Verne-y concept for a military balloon, presented to by General Russell Thayer, and published in the Scientific American Supplement in 1885.  In this iteration the aircraft is labeled a "war-balloon" but looks benign and observational; in the second image, see a month later in Harper's Weekly, the balloon is definitely a war machine, having just bombed something with what looks like an enormous explosive. The scene here illustrates an airship in flight over a very industrialized section of a city, perhaps to drive home a propaganda point that bombing was accurate enough to be strategic and also that targets were industries and not general populations. 

(The first aerial bombing seems to have been during the first Italian War of Independence and used by the Austrians from a  balloon against Venice in 1849; while this 1916 bombing occurred a few years after the first bomb was dropped from a heavier-than-air aircraft during the Italo-Turkish War on 1 November 1911, the Italians this time delivering the blow in Tripoli.)  

The idea of aerial bombardment was an enormous threat, imagining death coming from above,  huge airships dropping untold numbers of bombs upon a city--I imagine that the idea came as much a blow to someone at the end of the 19th c as the threat of nuclear devastation came to those in the mid-20th c.  As a matter of fact S.L. Koter and J.E. Gessler quote an unnamed "distinguished officer in the U.S. Navy" implying much the same thinking as would be later heard as nuclear-weapons-inspired Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD): "War will become impossible because it will signify not merely great loss of life and property, but annihilation". (Ballooning, a History; 1782-1900, p. 268.)

It is particularly interesting to note here that Thayer, proposes to use a propulsion system that is not dependent on a propeller but rather "compressed air".  “In the independent balloon the motor is a high pressure air compressor coupled directly to a newly devised carbonic acid gas engine and a reservoir for storing the air until sufficient pressure is obtained. The construction of the dependent balloon is similar to that of the independent ship except as regards the motive power which is here electricity...”

Tri-Triplane Monster Plane (1921)

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A short article (with a smaller photo illustration)  on a very big topic appeared in Illustrated World in June 1921. The photo showed a remarkable plane constructed by aeronautical engineer Giovanni Caproni (1886-1957)--three planes, really. Three triplanes were attached to a floating Pullman-like fuselage, making this the largest/heaviest aircraft ever built at that time. It was 32' high, 66' long, and 130' wide, and was made to seat 100 and make a transatlantic voyage. This was the "Noviplano" (the Caproni Ca. 6c, and translated in the article as "Nine-plannen"), and presented itself in an impressive if not complicated manner--it was a prototype, though, and was crashed and finished on its second flight.  

One Word, Three Un-hyphenated (?!) F's in a Row!

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2746

 

I just came upon this fine word, which for a moment challenged my probably under-corrected vision, and saw that it contained three consecutive f consonants! On a Saturday, cranky with a fever and stiff(f) neck, this was a superb BLAST! Or “blast”. Or “b”. Anyway the word is Luftschifffahrft and it occurs in the title of a pamphlet by Wenzel Kotzauer, Die Luftschifffahrt und ihre Zukunft, printed in Vienna in 1895.

The forty-page pamphlet is about the future of air flight and as fixed-winged aircraft rather than airships, noting in particular the 1894 Hiram Maxim “aeroplane¹”. The Maxim machine was prodigious, and was mainly built for testing purposes—it weighed 3 to 4 tons, carried two steam engines that generated 180hp (!) and had pushing props that were 17.5' in diameter, making the thing a beast-and-a-half. It was fixed to a very wide two-track system to keep it from lifting off the ground when the engines were running—or to keep it from careening around out of control. In any event, Maxim's dream machine didn't make it very far and was dismantled after a few years. (He also attempted an unsuccessful return to heavier-than-air flight in 1910.)

But back to the three Fs. “Luftschifffahrt”, which translates basically to “airplane” or perhaps “aeroplane”, and thus the title is about Airplane/ship/aeroplane Travel in the Future. Or thereabouts. It is a technical work, with much on the actual “aeroplane”, which in its first use were the wings, and here there is much discussion on their size and shape.

What most interests me though are the repetitive consonants. They just don't seem to happen in English, naturally, without being hyphenated. (Using the word “un-hyphenated” again I just want to point out its terrific irony!) The word appears with fewer letters as “Schifffahrt”, which is simply "shipping”.

The most obvious hyphenated candidate for me is “cross-section”, which I use often in this blog, though I can't kill the hyphen and pulling the two words together as it makes it look like overstuffed snake-sausage: crosssection. As smaller snake is the person who sees a seer is not a seeer, and Scrabble-challenged words like “zzz” and “brrr^etc” definitely do not count, noooo sir.

Anyway: fff.

Notes:

1.  In general at this time "aeroplane" referred to the wings/airfoils of a plane, not so much as an aircraft itself.  Mostly, it seems. The Oxford English Dictionary says that the first use of the word in this sense occurs in 1866, with a useful explanation of it found two years later:

All of the following come from the Oxford English Dictionary:

“Aeroplane”

1868   3rd Ann. Rep. Aëronaut. Soc. 36   He had turned his attention to the wing and to the sustainer, or what he might call the aëroplane.

1894   O. Chanute Progress in Flying Machines 237   This main aeroplane..is trussed and stiffened in every direction by wire stays.

1905   G. Bacon Balloons 111   What are called ‘aeroplanes’—large flat surfaces, light but rigid inclined at a suitable angle to the horizon.

Aeroplane=aircraft/airplane (as a noun) comes at about the same time:

1868   Eng. Mechanic 24 Apr. 91/2   We have yet to see the ‘aëroplane’ with buoyancy sufficient to sustain 150 lb., or with apparatus sufficiently light and portable to make headway on an ‘air plane’... Supposing an aëroplane to have raised itself, if it reared out of equilibium it and the occupant would come to grief.

1873   D. S. Brown in 8th Ann. Rep. Aëronaut. Soc. 17   I think this [sc. impetus] will be more requisite with respect to the aëroplane than any other vehicle.

1873   Ann. Rep. Aëronaut. Soc. 20   Mr. Bennett introduced an Aëroplane invented by a Frenchman, to be worked by a screw by motive power derived from elastic springs.

Finally, "airplane" as a noun comes into existence, or nearly so, in the early part of this past century:

1906   Sci. Amer. 29 Dec. 487/1   Air-plane is a much better word than aeroplane. It is as good etymologically, and much better when it is spoken.

1907   Westm. Gaz. 19 July 4/2   It is this ease of going against the current, with no motive force in evidence, that is..the despair of the aeronauts with their air-planes.

1917   N.A.C.A. (U.S.) Rep. Nomencl. Aeronaut. 31   Airplane..This term is commonly used in a more restricted sense to refer to airplanes fitted with landing gear suited to operation from the land. If the landing gear is suited to operation from the water, the term ‘Seaplane’ is used.

 

A History of Big: Massive Aircraft, 1936

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In the history of aircraft, there's big, really big, and then Hughes H-4 ("Spruce Goose") big.  Then there's the ocean-going aircraft below, found on p. 529 in the 1936 volume of Popular Mechanics. The nameless aircraft would be more than 375' long and have a wingspan of 550'.  By comparison, an aircraft called the "Stratolaunch" now under construction and designed by Burt Rutan, would have a wingspan of 385'. The "Spruce Goose" was 319' wide and 216' long; the 747-8 was 249'wide and 242' long; and the Airbus A 380-800 stands 262' wide and 236' long. In short, of planes having flown, this fabulous thing with the 550' wings would be twice their size.  

That said, this giant aircraft was limited not by imagination but by flight of technological fancy. It was supposed to require a crew of 100, fly at only 12k feet at 300mph, and make it across the Atlantic in 11 hours. So, the size was certainly awesome by today's standards; the tech business end of it, not so much. In any event, the image is quite striking:

 

 

How to Fly a Farman Biplane (1910)

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I couldn't resist sharing this because, well, I don't often see a one-sheet explanation on how to fly a plane.  This is from the Illustrated London News, May 7, 1910, and concerns the Farman biplane:  

Transatlantic Floating Airports, 1936

This interesting and exploratory pamphlet,  Application of Seadrome Ocean Dock Corporation (a private corporation) for a Loan Under the Provisions of the National Industrial Recovery (1933) was the result of the work of Edward R. Armstrong (1880-1955), and proposed a series of floating airports to facilitate transatlantic flights.

The outline for this plan asks the federal government for a loan of $30 million (Depression) dollars to undertake the construction of a five floating airports transoceanic network.  "It will require the work of approximately 10,000 men per month for a period of twenty-four to thirty months".  The labor figures did not include was what necessary to produce all of the material necessary for the project ( for reasons unknown).  Once finished the network would enable aircraft  to make it across the ocean in 18 to 36 hours.

The members of the Seadrome Corporation estimated that the entire 30 million would be paid back by 1945,  and that the corporation would be completely debt-free.  Perhaps all of  this made sense when Armstrong first developed the plan in 1913, just ten years after the Wright brothers' successful first in North Carolina. The idea of the floating airport girding the Atlantic was a pretty interesting idea, seeing as how the world record for sustained non-stop flight in 1913 was 11 hours (in a Maurice Farman MF-2), and that was under more-or-less optimal conditions; the speed record was 120mph, and again, optimal conditions and not sustained for hours on end.  By 1933 it seems to me that it had become obvious that non-stop transoceanic flight was coming, and coming soon.  That would of course make an investment in the Seadrome project superfluous, like building an antique, though an unnecessary one. The first transatlantic non-stop flight was made by John Alcock and Arthur W. Brown in 1919, averaging about 100mph; Lindbergh would come later to accomplish the first solo non-stop in 1927--by the early 1950's jet aircraft would be making the trip with regularity, which means that  for most of the life of the completed Seadrome it would have been unnecessary.  I feel certain that the Seadrome--which was supposed to be paid off by 1945, though in 1933 there was no inkling on the part of the Corporation members who wrote the request for the money that a war was looming and that there would have been almost no way for them to have been made at any time between 1939 and 1945--would never have been paid for.Armstrong’s idea would get major play in the popular press from time-to-time, and discussed as a series of floating islands.  Armstrong himself would organize the Seadrome Ocean Dock Corp. in the late 1930’s, his pretty but  impractical idea (reported by Time Magazine¹ in 1933 as little more than “a perennial gift to Sunday feature editors”)  finally grinding to a salty end with greater fuel capacity and efficiency in transatlantic aircraft. 

As I said, this idea seemed pretty good when it was shiny and new, but less so as time went on and aircraft became larger, more powerful, and more efficient, capable of making the trip on their own. 

Notes:

 

First Use of an Airplane in "War Conditions" 1911

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I am not an historian of aviation, though the item I just found grazing through a volume of the Illustrated London News for 1911 may be one of the asterixed poor Roger Maris footnotes in the history of military flight. The title of the series of pictures--"Its First Use Under War Conditions--an Aeroplane on Scout Duty" appeared in the ILN issue for 15 April, and referred to flights being made over the U.S./Mexican border during the Border War of 1910-1919, (Poncho Villa, Mexican Revolution, J.J. Pershing, and all that). The writer didn't want to go so far as to state that these were actual war conditions in which the plane was being flown, remarking that they were “Taken under what might be described fairly as war conditions”. So, it seems as though the title is accurate in a restricted way.

I am not sure when the first use of a plane was as a scout vehicle during wartime, though certainly the first use of an airplane to deliver a bomb in a battle during actual wartime occurred seven months later. “During fighting in November 1911 between Italy and forces loyal to the Turkish, Ottoman Empire, Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti wrote in a letter to his father: 'Today I have decided to try to throw bombs from the aeroplane. 'It is the first time that we will try this and if I succeed, I will be really pleased to be the first person to do it.' “--Alan Johnston, BBC News, “Libya 1911: How an Italian pilot began the air war era”

And indeed he did, and he was.

Prof. Langley's Aeroplane of 1893

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In the Department of Victorian Understatement, the example following would be ranked...nominal. This was a general leading statement on a short one-page review of Samuel P. Langley's¹ model flying machine, found in the pages of the Scientific American for 22 April 1893 by H.E. Mead and quoting from the New York Herald. This is one of Langley's earliest physical attempts at a flying machine, coming after four years of work (the same year work was commenced by Hiram Maxim and with the more mature work of Octave Chanute), the drawbacks of which began the article's review:

• “The only apparent drawback to this particular method of aerial flight is in maintaining an upright position of the apparatus, free from the ground, until sufficient velocity is attained for soaring ; and the means of alighting after flight. Other than the above mentioned difficulties (for which Professor Langley may have provided), the principle seems feasible, more especially when backed by so careful and competent authority.”

So, basically, it seems that what the machine was wanting was the ability to fly and land. This was never meant to hold a pilot, and was entirely experimental.  The characteristics of the model:

• 
  “It is 15 feet in length and 5 centimeters (or practically 2 inches) in diameter. To give rigidity to the skeleton, longitudinal ribs of stiff steel are provided, intersected at intervals by cross ribs of pure aluminum, the result being a lattice framework of great strength.”
• “There are four boilers of thinly-hammered copper, weighing a little more than seven pounds each, and they occupy the middle portion of the fish Screws of various pitches and ranging from 20 to 80 centimeters in diameter have been experimented with, but it is not yet definitely determined which shall be adopted for· trial. With the smallest the engines develop a speed of 1, 700 revolutions a minute. With the larger ones the speed is somewhat decreased. A thin jacket of asbestos covers the upper portion of the body of the fish.”
• “The wings, or aeroplanes, are sector-shaped and consist of light frames of tubular aluminum steel covered with China silk. The front one is 42 inches wide in the widest part and has an extreme length of 40 feet from tip to tip. The rear one is somewhat smaller. Both aeroplanes are designed to be adjustable with reference to the angle they present to the air.”

It is interesting to note the attention this short perspective gave to the security and secrecy of the research:

• “At the (Smithsonian) institution the strictest injunctions were laid on the watchmen to keep all intruders off the scent. The watchmen themselves were instructed to turn their backs or walk to the other end of the corridor when word was passed from the chief that some article was to be conveyed to or from the secret chamber.”

To be fair about this some amount of secrecy was involved given the status of the kookiness in which much of the general public view the pursuit of flight--or at least the construction of large, relatively heavy models like this one. Langley had an enormous reputation to protect, and one part of that security was to keep that intact while the aeroplane was in its developmental phases, keeping the project free from derision which may have caused a problem so far as funding was concerned. That said,  Langley had conducted lectures in the great hall in which he demonstrated the flying capability of 16-gram models, so that part of his research was very public. Also, there was some proprietary work being conducted, so there's that aspect of the secrecy bit. The Wright Brothers would be very cautious for some of these reasons, though they steadfastly used their own money generated from their bicycle shop.  (By the way "aeroplane" was not used quite yet, I believe, as a word for the aircraft, but rather as a name for the wings, and for their sections.) 

Langley would never be on quite the right page in these earliest days of heavier-than-air powered flight, and in slightly less than a decade he would be out of the adventure altogether after his large-scale aerodrome took and immediate nosedive into the Potomac from its moored scow launching pad--it was the Wrights of course who saw a far clearer and more incisive (and brilliant) ways in the power train, material, launching, and how to control the plane once in flight and how to keep it aloft. 

Notes:

1. Langley has appeared often on this blog for one reason or another and if you want some background on the man simply search his name in the Google search box at upper right.  

Aeroplane Roulette, 1912

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It took a few years for the Wright Brother's iconic and monumental flights of 1903 to be thoroughly and popularly deemed not-crackpot, but once that was the case, the Wrights, and their flying machine, and aeroplanes in general, were heralded as the future-arriving. (It seems to me that their fame was mounting over a few years, but still, their reception was limited--it wasn't like Einstein becoming instantly immortalized following the eclipse confirmation of 1919, being obscure one day and immortalized soon after, but they did go from relative quiet to international renown in a couple of years.) 

In any event, by 1912 there were aeroplane toys, and games, and popularly sold sheet music for songs, and also, evidently, a version of roulette made to accommodate the cascading interest in the new technology. I had never seen this toy/game/gaming apparatus before tonight, and I was happy to see it:

Source: Popular Mechanics, p 553. 

Proving that Heavier-than-Air Powered Flight was Possible--Samuel Langley, 1896

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2743 

I came upon this article last night in the pages of Nature--it doesn't look like much, but it turns out to contain a first-person account of an historic moment in the history of aviation. The article, “Experiments in Mechanical Flight”, is by Samuel Pierpont Langley (1834-1906) and Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922). and appears in volume 54, May 28, 1896, page 80 in the issue of pp 73-96. It contains the first account printed in England of heavier-than-air non-piloted sustained powered flight--and proof that mechanical heavier-than-air flight with existing technology was real. (This article appeared on 28 May; a somewhat shortened account appeared in Comptes Rendus... two days earlier, on the 26th. The first printed announcement of the event  seems to have been in Science, May 22, 1896, according to Brockett's Bibliography of Aeronautics, #7160.)

I think most people remember Langley as the (Third) Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and for his work in astrophysics and observational astronomy, but he was a significant figure in the history of aviation, publishing his first extended work in the field in Experiments in Aerodynamics in 1891, and became one of the first if not the first aerodynamics experimenter in the U.S. He was also the first government-sponsored in-house researcher in this field.

This article (or notice, really) covers Langley's  historic experiments of 6 May 1896 with his 13'-wide Aerodrome 5--the fifth iteration of his mechanical flying machine--which was launched from a makeshift "houseboat" ("...nothing more than a scow about 30 feet long by 12 feet wide, upon which a small house was erected, to be used for the occasional storing of the aerodromes...”)¹ moored in the Potomac River a few miles south of D.C. near Quanitco, Virginia. There was one witness to this affair, Langley being very concerned for privacy, particularly not wanting news of failures to reach a general audience. His guest observer was his old friend, Alexander Graham Bell, who had already witnessed some of Langley's earlier attempts with models and made monetary contributions to help fund the larger enterprises. Langley had no interest in making the report—though he did invite Bell to do so. And it is the second part of this short, two-part paper in which Bell's observations appear.

Langley's own description of the aircraft appeared in his Mechanical Flight² : "The aerodrome was built chiefly of steel, though lighter material entered into the construction, so that its density as a whole was a little below unity. No gas whatever entered into the construction of the machine, and the absolute weight, independent of fuel and water, was about 11 kilos (24 pounds). The width of the supporting surfaces was about 4 metres (13 feet), and the power was furnished by an extremely light engine of approximately one horse-power. There was no one to direct it on board, and the means for keeping it automatically in horizontal flight were not complete. It is important to remark that the small dimensions of the machine did not allow it to include any apparatus for condensing the steam, so that it could only carry water enough for a very brief course—a drawback which would not be encountered in one of a larger construction.”

Bell's description of the aircraft: “On the date named two ascensions were made by the aerodrome, or so-called “flying machine,” which I will not describe here further than to say that it appeared to me to be built almost entirely of metal, and driven by a steam engine which I have understood was carrying fuel and a water supply for a very brief period, and which was of an extraordinary lightness.” And “The method of propulsion was by aerial screw propellers, and there was no gas or other aid for lifting it in the air except its own internal energy...The absolute weight of the aerodrome, including that of the engine and all appurtenances, was, as I was told, about twenty-five pounds, and the distance from tip to tip of the supporting surfaces was, as I observed, about twelve or fourteen feet³.”

The flying experiment began, and much to the delight of Langley, Bell, and the men who fished previous flying efforts from the Potomac, the two Aerodrome 5 flights for the day were successful. The first flight brought the steam-driven, one-quarter-scale model made a half mile at altitudes of up to 100 feet, marking it the world's first flight of its type. The second flew longer, and faster (3300' and 9 seconds aloft), and Bell was much impressed by the serenity of the plane's descent once the engine exhausted its fuel, turning the plane into a glider that touched lightly down onto the Potomac.

Bell was thrilled with the display, and recorded what he felt:

• The flying machine "resembled an enormous bird, swooping steadily upward in a spiral path until it reached a height of about 100 feet in the air.”

And then, Bell famously observed:

• “It seems to me that no one who was present on this interesting occasion could have failed to recognize that the practicability of mechanical flight had been demonstrated.”

The once-reticent Langley himself writes an account of the event in “The Flying Machine” in the June 1897 issue of McClure's (vol IX/2)--this was a very public article in a very popular magazine that also featured a drawing of the aerodrome right on the front cover.  The article also includes the Bell observations as well as the first printing of the photograph that Bell made of the second flight, the first of its kind, though it is really a drawing after the photograph, the photo itself used as proof of the event and the drawing done to enhance that. The coverage of the event and the Bell statement also appears in the Smithsonian Reports for 1896 (published in 1897). Later, Scientific American Supplement #1404 , Nov 29, 1902, reprints the Bell observations and other historical statements in “The Langley Aerodrome”.  

The Aerodrome 5 in flight. Image via Langley's 1911 Experiments...(see below; the image is not in the Nature article)

Even in the face of support of U.S. presidents and stipends from the military, and with a history of mounting successes, the public failure in two attempted flights of his expanded, full-size Aerodrome A (a refitted and larger #5 and #6, this time designed for a pilot, and powered by a state-of-the-art 52hp engine designed by Charles Manly) on October 7, 1903 proved to be too much for Langley and his supporters, resulting in a withdrawal of funding, and the relatively quick retirement of Langley from this field. Just weeks later (December 17) the Wrights made their historic flight at Kitty Hawk--they were successful in many of the ways that Langley was not and made the first manned, powered, controlled, and sustained flight. Early aviation expert Tom Crouch of the National Air and Space Museum remarked that "The problem was the machine itself and Langley's approach...he did just about everything wrong that the Wright brothers did right. “⁴

That said, John D. Anderson Jr in the AIAA Journal states that it must not be overlooked that “[Langley] made extensive use of aerodynamic coeffcients and legitimately shares with Lilienthal the credit for introducing the concept of lift, drag, and resultant force coeffcients to the applied aerodynamics community. His data are the first substantive proof of the aerodynamic superiority of high-aspect-ratio wings over those with low aspect ratio; it is curious that Langley is not widely recognized for this important contribution."  And significantly, “the work did serve a very useful purpose. The fact that a man of Langley’s stature believed in the possibility of the flying machine was enough to convince most laymen that aeronautics was no longer the pastime of fools.”⁵

NOTES

1. Samuel P. Langley and Charles Manly (editor), Langley Memoir in Mechanical Flight, Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, Washington, D.C., 1911. Part I (Langley), 1887-1896; Part II (Manly), 1897-1903. 
2. _____. Langley, p. 123.
3. From the Nature article, quoted above.
4. Lee Wolff, "First in Flight (Almost)", http://www.chopawamsic.com/First%20Flight.htm
5. John D. Anderson Jr., “ Langley’s Aeronautical Research: A Modern Critique and Reassessment”, AIAA JOURNAL Vol. 35, No. 3, March 1997 Historical Review Paper.

The extended  quote by Bell in the last three paragraphs from the Comptes Rendus:

“La durée du vol, dans le second essai, fut d'une minute et trente-une secondes et la vitesse moyenne entre vingt et vingt-cinq milles à l'heure (soit dix mètres par seconde) sur un trajet qui fut constamment en pente ascendante.”

 “Je fus extrêmement frappé du vol aisé et régulier de la machine dans les deux essais, et du fait que lorsque l'appareil, privé de la force motrice de la vapeur au plus haut point de sa course, fut abandonné à lui-même, il descendit chaque fois avec une égalité d'allure qui rendrait tout choc ou tout danger impossibles.”

“Il me semble que personne n'aurait pu assister à cet intéressant spectacle sans être convaincu que la possibilité de voler dans l'air à l'aide de moyens mécaniques venait d'être démontrée. “ 

The "hosueboat", with launching apparatus and with the aerodrome in place (from Langley, 1911):   

From the Department of Vast Understatement (1958): a Half-Visible Wernher von Braun

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2742

What does one do about Wernher von Braun? For a long time it was difficult to find his name at the National Air and Space Museum, though I don't know what that status is, nowadays. In 1958 I know what was up with him, at least according to the dust jacket of this book he co-authored, one of the first books on satellite communication, Project Satellite.  (I can almost here the echo of the title repeating, a la 1958...)

It is there that we are told that Dr. von Braun "has been working in the United States since 1945". Indeed he was, thanks to having been swept up by U.S. forces at the end of the war just 40 days or so after the last V-2 was launched. There were many others taken by the U.S. in this way, though von Braun was hardly alone as a Nazi working as a rocketeer for Adolf Hitler, but he may have been one of the few members of the Nazi Party who were collected and worked  at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama, there in 1958.

"...(H)e engaged in pioneering experiments which produced the forerunners of today's gigantic missiles". So true--and just when I thought that the blurb writer would skip mentioning the V-2, they do:

"As Technical Director at Peenemude he was responsible for the V-2 and other famous rockets of World War II."

And there it is. 

Let's remember that von Braun was a Nazi, worked hard for Hitler's ear to keep his projects rolling, and used slave labor (12,000+ of whom were worked to death at Peenemunde and related sites) to build his "famous rocket", the great forerunner of "today's gigantic missiles". The V-2 began its life ending lives soon after D-Day, with more than 5,000 of them launched primarily against British and Belgian targets, killing 2,754 and wounding 6,523 in London, alone, and terrifying everyone. His pioneering spirit can be seen in the following extraordinary map, which begins to show the V-2 action on London:

map via The Londonist https://londonist.com/2013/06/v2

The map makes quite an impression, no? 

And he helped create the U.S. space program. 

Back to the book jacket--what else could they say, I wonder, back in the thick and near-disastrous days of the Cold War?

The Department of Things that Didn't Seem as Though They Could Fly, but Did (1907)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This aircraft not only moved, but flew:

Source: the 1907 Philips flying machine,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Frederick_Phillips

 

Offhand it seems to be the winner of an award for the design of the most unflyable-looking aircraft award where the aircraft had some chance of actually lifting off and was not made of cement and hope.  

The design belongs to Horatio Philips (1845-1924), a jolly-looking pioneer whose belief in multiple layers of lifting surfaces working together brought him to this aircraft, which in 1907 flew about 150m, and became the first powered aircraft created by a Brit to fly in England. Evidently the 200-wing aircraft powered by a 22-hp engine was basically not-controllable, but it did fly, and Philips experiments and practices (if not the aircraft themselves) and particularly for airfoil research were of some importance in the history of aviation.  

 

 

 

Early Aerial Bombing, 1916

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This issue of Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig) was published 27 April 1916 (volume 146, number 3800) and features an early-ish image of an airship bombing a city. The first time this occurred in WWI was in the autumn of 1914, at Liege, with a bombing campaign initiated against London in January 1915.  (The first aerial bombing seems to have been during the first Italian War of Independence and used by the Austrians from a  balloon against Venice in 1849; while this 1916 bombing occurred a few years after the first bomb was dropped from a heavier-than-air aircraft during the Italo-Turkish War on 1 November 1911, the Italians this time delivering the blow in Tripoli.) The scene here illustrates an airship in flight over a very industrialized section of a city, perhaps to drive home a propaganda point that bombing was accurate enough to be strategic and also that targets were industries and not general populations. 

• "Airships made about 51 bombing raids on England during the war. These killed 557 and injured another 1,358 people. More than 5,000 bombs were dropped on towns across Britain, causing £1.5 million in damage. 84 airships took part, of which 30 were either shot down or lost in accidents. Aeroplanes carried out 27 raids, dropping 246,774 lb (111,935 kg) of bombs for the loss of 62 aircraft, resulting in ground casualties of 835 dead, 1,972 injured and £1,418,272 of material damage."--Wikipedia