Читать книгу The Rise of the Flying Machine - Hugo Byttebier - Страница 24

Further Progress on the Powerplant

Whilst a new school of pioneers were beginning to dream of flight without power, the aircraft engine was progressing with giant strides.

The German engineer Nikolaus Otto’s success in making a smooth-running four-stroke engine has been discussed above. The Otto engine was much too heavy to serve on aircraft, which needed a powerplant along the lines of Ponton d’Amécourt memorable words of 1864: “What is needed for the conquest of the air is a horse in a watch-case”.

Jules Armengaud, an eminent engineer of that time, discussing the new Otto engine in the January 1878 issue of L’Aéronaute arrived at the conclusion that in order to become light, gas engines would have to reach a high rate of revolutions. It was a perfectly logical conclusion and the way towards the high-speed engine was opened shortly afterwards by Gottlieb Daimler, a manager of the Deutz Company.

Daimler was a fiery character continually at loggerheads with his colleague Nikolaus Otto and for that reason he had seen his contract with Deutz repealed in June 1882.

Daimler lost no time in persuading another first class engineer, Wilhelm Maybach, to leave Deutz as well, and together they worked out a way to create a small high-speed four-stroke engine and actually had one running at 600 rpm by the end of 1883.

The first little Daimler engines weighed less than 100 kg per hp and the possibility of using them for road vehicles was at once considered. They were not yet horses in a watch-case, but that ideal was nearer. In 1885 a motorcycle was built, followed by a car in 1886, as every student of automotive history knows.

Finally, in 1888 after a fruitless approach to the Prussian Airship Battalion, Daimler was able to sell the first aerial engine to work with internal combustion to Karl Woelfert, a Leipzig bookseller and aeronautical fanatic, who installed a 2 hp Daimler engine in a dirigible balloon. The first attempt was a failure because the airship did not rise nor was it dirigible, but a first attempt had been made.