Читать книгу The Rise of the Flying Machine - Hugo Byttebier - Страница 14

The fruitful decade

Human progress sometimes proceeds by leaps and bounds and the 1860s and 1870s were a case in point in the field of flight. In 1860 J. E. Lenoir invented and then built the first internal combustion engine “firing inflammable air with a due portion of common air under a piston” as Cayley had proposed in 1809.

It is true that, as soon as illuminating gas was invented by Philippe Lebon in 1799, means were sought to use gas as a fuel for machines that produced power, with the principal difficulty being thought to lie in the means of mixing gas and air before combustion could take place. Lenoir solved the problem in one masterful stroke by effecting the mixing inside the working cylinder itself. He simply built a copy of a steam engine that admitted a quantity of gas and air during the first part of the working stroke which was then ignited half-way, producing an explosion that did useful work during the rest of the stroke. The return stroke was used to expel the burned gases and then the cycle began anew.

Lenoir’s engine generated much enthusiasm among aircraft pioneers, but this enthusiasm soon waned when it was found that the heavy, shaking gas motor, needing water to cool the cylinder and consuming great amounts of gas and lubricating oil, was less suitable as an aeronautical powerplant than the steam engine in use at that time.

However, several other initiatives began to encourage the aeronautical movement both in England and in France. After the demise of Dupuis Delcourt’s society in 1853, a group of enthusiasts gathered in Paris on 30 July 1863 at the instigation of the well-known photographer Jules Nadar to hear a manifesto concerning aerial locomotion which caused considerable agitation.

Nadar founded a journal with title L’Aéronaute which had a short life due to a lack of subscribers but set the ball rolling. The idea was to single-mindedly promote the art of flying by means of machines heavier than air. Gustave Vicomte Ponton d’Amécourt, one of Nadar’s principal collaborators, had written in 1853, “We will try in vain to solve the problem of aerial navigation as long as we do not suppress the balloon.” Nevertheless, as Navier had calculated that fixed-wing flight was impossible, all minds were set on developing a machine lifted by airscrews.

Another enthusiast, Guillaume Joseph Gabriel de La Landelle, published a book in 1863 with the title Aviation ou Navigation Aérienne (sans ballons) in which the word aviation was used for the first time. This book showed a drawing of a flying vessel that was moved and supported by several horizontal propellers and de La Landelle asserted that by such means 1000 kg could be lifted by a force of 4 hp.

De La Landelle’s flying ship was never built for obvious reasons but it fired the imagination of Jules Verne, who published the best-seller Robur the Conqueror (also translated into English as The Clipper of the Clouds) describing a flying ship moved by multiple horizontal airscrews as in de La Landelle’s vision.

Ponton d’Amécourt went to the trouble of building an extremely light engine for helicopter use which worked with steam at a pressure of 150 lbs/sq in. from a generator built almost entirely of aluminium, which thereby made its initial appearance as a lightweight metal for light aircraft engines.