Читать книгу The Rise of the Flying Machine - Hugo Byttebier - Страница 10

The Search for Power

At the time when Newton was making his observations, the search for mechanical sources of energy was in full flight. During the last quarter of the 17th century, ideas and proposals were beginning to be formed around the use of heat produced by chemical reactions for use in motors. This started a series of discoveries, which eventually resulted in supplanting animal musclepower as man’s principal source of energy, and thereby helped to abolish slavery as a happy side-effect.

The first to convert these ideas into practice was the great Dutch scientist Christian Huyghens. In 1673 he presented an internal combustion engine that burned minute quantities of gunpowder to the French Academy of Science.

Huyghens’ machine was used in Paris for pumping water. His young assistant, Denis Papin, later built an identical engine for Charles Landgrave of Hesse. But Papin hit upon a more practical way of raising pressure inside the working cylinder by using steam.

Although Papin’s engines worked on the model devised by Huyghens by creating a vacuum under a piston, the use of steam made the control of combustion much easier and this marked the beginnings of the steam engine, which was then rapidly developed, becoming the first type of engine to be used as a power source for aircraft.

Papin was not able to pursue his discovery to any practical end and it was again in Britain that the steam engine was perfected through the efforts of James Watt, who turned it into a powerplant of practical use. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Richard Trevithick had designed and built machines which worked with the direct pressure of steam against a piston in order to obtain much higher powers than could be obtained by the system devised by Watt which still worked with atmospheric pressure.

At the same time one of the most extraordinary minds that ever studied the problems of aviation was active and began to write down his observations and findings. This was Sir George Cayley, a country squire who has been deservedly dubbed “father of aviation”.