Читать книгу Wings for the Fleet - George Van Deurs - Страница 10
ОглавлениеCHAPTER ONE: FIRST AMERICAN FLIGHTS
The United States Navy, which pioneered in ironclad warships, submarines, and nuclear power, was pushed into aviation. Man had been flying heavier-than-air machines for nearly seven years when the Navy first officially noticed aeronautics. Its natural conservatism should be viewed against the backdrop of what had been happening in the field of aviation.
Even after the Wrights had successfully taken to the air in 1903, scientists and engineers, such as Professor Simon Newcomb and Admiral George W. Melville, continued to prove in print that flying machines were impracticable, if not impossible. The Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute reflected professional naval thinking; no mention of flying machines is to be found in its pages before 1907.
At that time George Dewey, Admiral of the Fleet and President of the new General Board, was one who wondered if flying machines could be used at sea. He had been in the Navy before it had armored ships; he knew changes were possible. In 1904, he had gone to St. Louis to see Santos-Dumont fly his dirigible. The gas bag split before it got off the ground. But this experience did not disillusion the Admiral. He kept an open and inquiring mind. “If you can fly higher than the crow’s-nest, we will use you,” he told inventors.
In those early days, most men were so sure that aeroplanes were fakes that no mere news report could convince them; everyone had to see a flight for himself before he changed his opinion. Orville Wright’s flights at Fort Myer in 1908 converted the first large group of Americans. But at the time, most ranking naval officers were at sea, taking Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet around the world.
After the next Fort Myer show, the following year, the Fleet lay at anchor in the North River for the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration. Navy men then had a chance to watch the Wrights and their aircraft fight bumpy winds above Riverside Drive. But most of them did not think the Navy had a place for such things. Seafaring men are usually a conservative lot and to them the machine looked altogether too puny for use at sea.
The Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute reflected this traditionally conservative attitude. A British source was quoted praising a professor who had “demonstrated the small efficiency of the aeroplane as a war engine,” while it ridiculed a major who thought it might have military uses. A Scientific American author was also quoted as saying that no sane aviator would try to get off the ground if a breath of wind were stirring. He forecast a long wait before machines could land and take off with any degree of freedom. “The most absurd claim,” he said, “is . . . their ability to sail over hostile territory and destroy cities, fortifications, and military depots by dropping high explosives.” Other similar sources were presented arguing that artillery would force flying machines so high their bombs could not hit accurately, and anyway, the Russo-Japanese war had shown that good armor could not be punctured. In 1909, most military men agreed that flying machines had no present military value, could never be used as weapons, and offered only ultimate development as scouts.
2. The first powered heavier-than-air flight in the first Wright aeroplane, Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, 17 December 1903. (U.S. Army Air Force Photo, National Archives)
3. The Wright brothers, 1910. (Library of Congress)
But outside the Navy, the exhibition flights of the Wrights had triggered a considerable change of sentiment. From disbelief, the popular view changed to gullible credulity. Aviation magazines flourished. The science fiction of 1910 blossomed with aerial adventure stories. Men who had never flown, been to sea, or experienced a battle, wrote of bombed-out navies, blasted cities, and helpless armies. Not in the future, they asserted, but right then, flying machines had made armies and navies forever obsolete.
Inventors, sportsmen, millionaires, stuntmen, society leaders—everyone wanted to play a part in aviation. It was popular. It was stylish. But the Navy Department was unimpressed. Air shows were making big money for the Wrights, Curtiss, some far lesser-known aviators, and plain frauds. Reporters who knew nothing about flying wrote reams of improbable bunk about the fad. A few aviators soon achieved fame in the new business. Eugene Ely, a skinny, young mechanic in Portland, Oregon, was one. In April 1910, he pieced together a wrecked Curtiss plane and practiced taxiing it on a race track, until one afternoon it accidentally bounced into the air. That night he began contracting for exhibition flights. In July, he joined the Curtiss Exhibition Company, and by fall he was one of the nation’s leading professional flyers, with Aero Club of America license number 17.
The Navy still sat tight. In 1910, the Proceedings mentioned aeroplanes only once, using a quotation which proved that planes could never affect the outcome of a naval battle. The article ended, “The flying machine of fiction may be a very formidable monster, but the real thing is feeble enough, the sport of wind and a hundred mischances.” However, in the Department, responsible men faced an increasing volume of mail from air-minded civilians.
The Secretary of the Navy was the Honorable George von L. Meyer, a Bostonian, who had inherited position and money, made more of the latter in business, and then served ably as an ambassador and as Theodore Roosevelt’s postmaster general. He was a friend of European rulers, understood the political aspects of the Navy, and was proud of his reputation as an efficient administrator. He wanted to retain that reputation in spite of his ignorance of technical engineering and naval matters.
One July evening in 1909, Secretary Meyer took Senator Henry Cabot Lodge out to Fort Myer, in Arlington, Virginia, to watch Orville Wright make “a very successful and interesting flight.” Meyer later wrote that he considered the plane to be the “beginning of a new mode of transportation,” and he speculated on how different planes would look in 25 years. At the end of the month he noted in his diary, that “the Wrights made their flight to Alexandria and back to Fort Myer, carrying a passenger and averaging 42 miles an hour.”
4. Secretary of the Navy George von L. Meyer. (National Archives)
5. The Wright 1901 glider, being flown as a kite, on the dunes at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. (Smithsonian Institution)
For several reasons no naval use for aircraft occurred to him. He was not a technician. More important, both he and Rear Admiral Wainwright, his Aide for Operations, believed that Navy money should go into fighting machines, that planes would never fight. Even if bombing, which had been suggested, became practicable, it would never be used, he thought. He was certain, as was Wainwright, that the rules of chivalrous warfare would preclude such barbarity.
But what about all those letters to the Department from air-minded civilians? In September 1910, Secretary Meyer called in his Assistant Aide for Materiel and told him to answer the queries, to watch developments, and to bring up any that should concern the Navy. In this offhand fashion, 54-year-old Captain Washington Irving Chambers became the first naval officer to be permanently assigned to duties involving naval aviation.
One would like to think of man’s first flight as a dramatic single achievement. But in so complex a field this view is over-simplified. Many dreams and long years of theoretical experimentation preceded the actual event. Four centuries ago, Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings showed his grasp of some of the fundamental principles of flight. In the last half of the nineteenth century, inventors and experimenters were busy seeking their practical application. Such men as Otto and Gustave Lilienthal in Germany, Percy S. Pilcher in Great Britain, and John J. Montgomery and Octave Chanute in the United States, sought experience in building and flying gliders. Clement Ader built four unsuccessful planes, and the Frenchman, Alphonse Pénaud, designed a rubber-band-powered model that actually made a short flight.
These new developments were noted and studied by Samuel Pierpont Langley, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who by 1894 had designed a model which flew for a few seconds. Two years later, his model was making flights of distances up to 4,000 feet.
Langley’s “aerodrome” was a curious-looking contrivance. Four delicate wings, two on each side in tandem and braced with fine external wires, were attached to a central, keel-like frame. Weighing 26 pounds and 16 feet in length, this steam-powered model was capable of sustained flight for about a minute and a half, at the end of which time it would settle into the water with only minor damage.
Reports of these experiments reached Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, and he initiated an investigation by a joint Army-Navy board. This resulted in negotiations with Langley by the Board of Ordnance and Fortifications and an undertaking by Langley to construct a large-scale version of his flying machine which would be capable of carrying a man aloft. This was late in 1898.
6. Langley’s aerodrome, 7 October 1903. It “. . . hovered a moment, then plunged into the Potomac.” (Wide World Photo)
Then followed four and a half years of delay and frustration in the course of which, failing to find an adequate ready-made motor, either in the United States or abroad, one was designed and built. It was a rotary engine, which weighed 120 pounds and developed over 50 horsepower. Much time also was spent in devising a complicated spring-powered catapult device to launch the craft.
In July of 1903, all was declared ready. The aerodrome sat on its catapult atop a houseboat on the Potomac River. There had been plenty of advance publicity, and the reporters were out in force. Then some hitch caused the attempted flight to be postponed. This happened again and again during the summer but, on 7 October, Charles M. Manly, Langley’s assistant, got the machine up to 24 knots at the end of the launching platform. For a moment the aerodrome was airborne. According to a contemporary account, it “hovered a moment, then plunged into the Potomac.” On 8 December, there was another try in which the rear wings collapsed. Nine days later, down on the Carolina dunes, without any fanfare at all, the Wright brothers made the first successful heavier-than-air flight.
The publicity subsequent to Langley’s series of unsuccessful attempts and frustrating failures threw a vast cloud of doubt over the whole affair and indeed over the development of all aviation. The caustic ridicule broke Langley’s heart, and he died in 1906. Sixteen years later, his prophetic genius was recognized by the Navy when the first aircraft carrier, the USS Langley, was placed in service.
Two years after Langley had started work on his man-carrying aerodrome, the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, became interested in gliding. These young bachelors studied the records of Lilienthal and Chanute, and Langley’s air pressure tables. In the bicycle shop where they earned their living, they built biplane gliders with bamboo outriggers holding an elevator forward and a rudder aft. Seeking to find a place with gentle slopes and steady summer winds, they wrote to the Weather Bureau, which recommended Kitty Hawk, a remote village on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. There they assembled and flew their gliders.
Two summers of trial and error made the Wrights the first experimenters to realize the need for lateral controls, and the sea birds soaring low over the surf suggested to their minds flexible wing-tip controls. Basically, Langley and the Wrights worked from the same data, but approached the problem of flight differently. Langley had measured inert bird wings, the Wrights watched birds soar. Langley had taught the mathematics of ship stability. He applied these principles when he built a stable, self-propelled model of a flying machine, then scaled it up to man-carrying size. The Wrights first learned to fly rather unstable gliders, then scaled these up to carry a power plant. Later, a foot-square wind tunnel rigged up in Dayton gave them better data on the lift of cambered wings.
7. The Wright 1902 glider in flight at Kitty Hawk. (Smithsonian Institution)
8. Wilbur Wright in prone position following landing of his 1901 glider at Kitty Hawk. (Smithsonian Institution)
The next glider the Wrights took to Kitty Hawk had more efficient wings, with tips the operator could warp. That summer, more practice and tumbles taught them to glide straight, bank their turns, recognize stalls, and avoid them. When winter weather ended their 1902 gliding they knew less than Langley and Manly about ship stability, but far more about airmanship and wing design. They were certain they had the data to build, and the skill to fly, a powered machine.
During the spring and summer of 1903, they built a 4-cylinder, in-line, gasoline engine for a larger glider. Mounted, right of center, on the lower wing, it delivered its 16 horsepower through bicycle chains to two wooden propellers.
At Kitty Hawk two more months slipped by and winter arrived before the brothers had their machine ready. On 17 December 1903, just nine days after Langley’s fiasco, they tossed a coin for the first ride. Orville won. He stretched himself prone on the lower wing, where he balanced the 152-pound engine, and braced his toes on a cleat tacked to the rear spar. When he shifted his hips, the U-shaped saddle under his belly simultaneously moved rudder and wing tips. His right hand opened the throttle; his left operated the elevator.
Then, in the teeth of a 27-knot wind, the plane lifted off and Orville Wright flew 120 feet in 12 seconds. Each of the brothers flew twice that day. On the last flight, Wilbur covered 852 feet in 59 seconds and smashed a wing in landing. That night, when the big day was over, the inventors wired the news to their sister.
Unlike Langley’s experiment, theirs was a small, private venture. No advance notices, or big investments, drew reporters and official witnesses. Someone mentioned the flights on the Coast Guard party line along the Carolina-Virginia outer beaches. This word reached a couple of Norfolk newspaper men, who then offered garbled versions to distant papers. Conservative editors refused to buy; sensational papers printed implausible accounts of the machine’s cabin and the big propeller underneath that held it up.
When the Wright brothers went home to Dayton they were just small business men with the problem of a successful but unmarketable invention. In February 1904, the New York Independent printed a brief factual account of the flights over Wilbur’s signature. The Scientific American quoted it. Neither editor risked an opinion about the report.
That summer, from a leased field near Dayton, they flew and practiced turns in the air. Only a few farmer friends watched them. Big prizes were attracting many unsuccessful flying machine inventors to the St. Louis Exposition. But Orville and Wilbur stayed away. They considered their machine too simple and too valuable to show publicly before they were protected by patents.
9. A 1907 Wright aeroplane in flight at Pilot Training School, Montgomery, Alabama, 1910. (Wide World Photo)
10. Glenn L. Martin taught himself to fly and built his own Wright-type planes. (National Archives)
In January 1905, they made their first offer to demonstrate the machine to the Army at no cost to the government. The letter went to the Board of Ordnance and Fortifications. But its members, still touchy over the Langley debacle, wanted nothing to do with any flying machine. Even though no money was involved, they gave the Wrights a polite brush-off.
A year and a half later the brothers received a basic patent. It was so general that besides the warping of the wings, it covered every other system of lateral flight control that has ever succeeded. Nevertheless, the Board of Ordnance and Fortifications still refused a free look at their flying machine.
That summer, the Wrights planned to startle the government into action by suddenly appearing in their machine, as a floatplane, over the navies of the world assembled in Hampton Roads for the Jamestown Exposition. But they dropped the plan before the floats were ready because a British-French syndicate, which had quietly investigated their activities, invited them abroad to demonstrate their craft.
Their skill as fliers, acquired in seven years’ practice, made the Wrights an immediate success. By the end of summer, European companies were being licensed to build Wright machines, and American papers were spreading their fame. President Roosevelt prodded William Howard Taft, his Secretary of War, and Taft pushed the Board of Ordnance and Fortifications, which at long last got in touch with the Wrights. In December, the Board invited them to build and demonstrate, at no cost to the government, a machine that could take off in a short space, carry two persons for an hour at a speed of at least 40 miles per hour, hold enough fuel for a flight of 125 miles, and be easy to take apart and fold into an Army wagon.
In September 1908, by Army invitation, the Navy sent Lieutenant George Sweet and Naval Constructor William McEntee to be members of the Aero Board appointed to observe Orville Wright’s demonstration at Fort Myer. His plane was larger; the engine produced 25 horsepower. The pilot sat on the leading edge of the lower wing, instead of lying on his stomach. A foot throttle freed his right hand to manage the lever that now controlled wing tips and rudder. The passenger seat beside him on the centerline was partly in front of the radiator and engine. The outriggers could fold to let the machine ride atop a wagon. For the short takeoff, the plane straddled a monorail with one of its landing skids resting lightly on the ground. A line led from the machine, over a head-sheave on the track, then back to a weight hanging from a timber tripod to the rear of the monorail.
11. Captain Thomas S. Baldwin flying his balloon over Fort Myer, Virginia, 12 August 1908. Glenn Curtiss is running the four-cylinder, 24-horsepower motor. This first water-cooled Curtiss engine had enough power to drive the gas bag at twenty miles per hour. (National Archives)
On 3 September, at the Fort Myer, Virginia, parade ground, Sweet, McEntee, and a few hundred skeptics gathered around the Wright flying machine. Orville took his seat on the wing and raced the engine. Then he yanked a release rope, the weight fell, and the plane scooted along the rail and skimmed up into the air. Orville flew one and a half times around the parade ground in less than two minutes, then landed. He made it look easy and the crowd went wild.
Every day for the next two weeks, thousands of persons jammed the field to see a flight. Twice they saw Orville carry a passenger. When he stayed up for an hour and a quarter, it was a world’s record. Sweet was enthusiastic. He talked to Orville about flying from a ship. The inventor thought it would be easy. He offered to help draw up practicable specifications for a suitable machine.
Then, on 17 September, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, United States Army, rode as Orville’s passenger. They had planned a passenger-carrying test flight to Alexandria and back. Moments after they left the ground, a propeller tip cut a tail brace wire. The rudder flopped over, trailing at a crazy angle. Orville tried to avoid trees and rough ground ahead by turning back toward the field. On the turn, the machine stalled and dove into the ground. Selfridge, crushed by the engine and radiator, was the first man killed in an aeroplane.
George Sweet’s original report of the trials proposed that the Navy take up Orville Wright’s offer and get planes for shipboard tests. This suggestion stopped with his superior, Rear Admiral Cowles, Chief of the Bureau of Equipment. Two and a half months later, Cowles signed an emasculated revision which stated in part: “From recent tests at Fort Myer and reports of this machine from France . . . it has been demonstrated beyond a doubt that aeroitation [sic] is finally an accomplished fact . . . and man can fly when he wants to within the limits of the machine.” The remainder of seven pages listed possible future aeroplane developments and obvious naval applications. There was no account of the Fort Myer flights, no mention of Orville Wright’s offer of assistance, and no recommendation for Navy action. Consequently, nothing came of it.
However, George Sweet had a recompense of sorts. On 9 November 1909, Lieutenant Frank P. Lahm, one of the Army’s first three pilots, who had been one of Sweet’s fellow members on the observing team, carried him as a passenger in the Army’s first Wright plane. Thus Sweet became the first naval officer to fly in a heavier-than-air machine.
Glenn Curtiss was a young man with an ingenious and inquiring mind who also got his start in a bicycle shop. His desire to get something to push his bicycle up the hills of Hammondsport, New York, led him to buy a mail-order engine, which he shortly improved upon. When other people saw his motorized bicycle, they wanted one like it, and soon Curtiss found his bicycle shop had turned into a motorcycle shop. He, like the Wrights, worked by trial and error, and his mechanical ability proved to be a great asset in designing his engines.
12. Glenn Curtiss in his June Bug, 4 July 1908. (Clara Studer)
One of his 2-cycle gasoline motorcycle engines was purchased by Captain Thomas S. (“Cap”) Baldwin, a builder of primitive blimps of the day. Baldwin hung the engine under a gas bag, called it an “airship,” and demonstrated it successfully at the St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. Would-be blimp builders, of whom there were quite a few, were soon ordering Curtiss engines. Later, Curtiss flew one of Baldwin’s blimps at Hammondsport; the event marked the beginning of his lifelong interest in aviation.
In January 1907, Curtiss assembled a saddle, a pair of handlebars, a frame, two wheels, and an 8-cylinder, 40-horsepower, dirigible engine and took it all to Florida. Dr. Alexander Graham Bell was one of the group that watched Curtiss and his motorcycle roar down Ormond Beach at 137 miles per hour. This record was destined to stand as man’s fastest speed on wheels for some 30 years. The Curtiss engine interested Bell. He had been a friend of Langley’s and had lately been experimenting with man-carrying kites. Could an engine be used on his kites? He invited Curtiss to visit him and discuss the possibility.
The following summer, at Bell’s summer home in Nova Scotia, the Aerial Experiment Association was organized. Besides Bell and Curtiss, its members were Lieutenant Selfridge (soon to die in a plane crash), and two young Canadian engineers, John A. D. McCurdy and F. W. Baldwin. It was agreed that each in turn would take the lead in designing a plane, and Mrs. Bell put up the money to build the machines in Curtiss’ shop at Hammondsport, New York.
Selfridge designed the first plane, and late in 1907, F. W. Baldwin flew it some 300 feet over frozen Lake Keuka before he crashed. In May 1908, Curtiss flew Baldwin’s design 1,000 feet. Then on the Fourth of July he flew a mile in a plane of his own design—the June Bug. As the Wrights did not make a first public flight at Fort Myer until September, this flight won the Scientific American prize offered for the first American straightaway flight of more than a kilometer. Despite the fact that the Wrights were still the only Americans who knew how to control an aircraft so as to fly in circles, Curtiss promptly advertised aeroplanes for sale with flying instruction for each purchaser.
Meanwhile, “Cap” Baldwin, the blimp builder, made the low bid for the Army’s first dirigible order. In order to qualify, the machine had to fly under power for two hours and be able to maneuver in any direction. In the spring of 1908, Curtiss built his first water-cooled engine for this machine, and helped Baldwin demonstrate his blimp at Fort Myer. It consisted of a long, open frame under a cigar-shaped balloon. Baldwin sat aft and steered. Out in front, Curtiss manned the engine and the elevator. While they flew, and passed, the Army tests, Orville Wright was assembling his plane on the same parade ground.
Curtiss now went seriously into the aeroplane business. He taught himself more airmanship, and he advertised. In 1909, he delivered a plane to the New York Aeronautical Association at Mineola and showed a couple of its members, who were wealthy sportsmen, how to fly it. Later, financed by them, he represented America in France at the world’s first International Air Meet and brought home the Gordon-Bennett cup for speed. The Aero Club of America gave him the first Federation Aeronautique Internationale license issued in America.
13. Curtiss took the wheels off the June Bug, added two floats, or canoe-like pontoons, and renamed the contraption the Loon.
Curtiss experimented with the hydroaeroplane, as he called it, hoping to recoup his fortunes with basic patents almost as valuable as the Wrights’. In 1908, he began by mounting his June Bug on a pair of canoeshaped pontoons, but the plane could never get up sufficient speed to take off. Before the Belmont meet he tried hydroplane floats, got up to speed, but failed to break free of the water’s suction; however, he was certain that he was close to success.
Curtiss won $10,000, on 29 May 1909, which had been offered by the New York World, for the first flight from Albany to New York City. He made the 137-mile trip in 152 minutes, with two stops for gas; his fame now began to approach that of the Wrights. He organized the Curtiss-Herring Company to build planes, and air show teams to advertise them. The Wrights met this competition with exhibition teams of their own, and patent infringement suits.
On 22 October 1910, the aviation world gathered at Belmont Park, New York, for the United States’ first international air meet. The Wrights kept aloof from social functions, associating only with their own pilots. They looked on other fliers as chiselers, who by using bootleg craft sought to avoid the payment of license fees justly due the Wrights. The Curtiss clique and other pilots regarded the Wrights as dour, unfriendly, and unapproachable. This situation developed into a lengthy suit for patent infringement, initiated by the Wright brothers. The crux of the issue lay between the principle of wing warping, which they had developed, and the hinged aileron that Curtiss built between the wings of his biplanes.
This issue was most bitterly fought out. In the end the federal courts ruled that the principle of wing-warping, invented by the Wrights, had been infringed by Curtiss’ hinged aileron. The legal quarrel quickly developed into a vicious personal feud which divided the aviation world during its early years and vastly complicated the whole aeronautical situation prior to 1917. The Wrights’ cockpit control system was complicated and unnatural, and produced pilots who flew but could solo only if a weight was in the other seat. The Curtiss system used normal reactions somewhat like the Deperdussin, a system of stick control which had been developed in France, and which eventually became standard for all aircraft.
Nearly seven years had passed since the memorable flight of the Wright brothers on the dunes of Kitty Hawk. In the years to follow, the U. S. Navy would take the first moves in making this new plaything of the air a vital part of future fighting fleets.
