Читать книгу The Rise of the Flying Machine - Hugo Byttebier - Страница 28

1883 to 1889: Advent of the Powerplant

Hitherto the progress towards the aeroplane had been mainly on the theoretical and ideal plane. Many projects and hypotheses had been disclosed and a few model aeroplanes had flown, but 1884 witnessed the great advance of the lighter-than-air ship when Commandant Charles Renard and A. C. Krebs’ dirigible “La France”, built with government funds by the official Aeronautical Institute at Chalais-Meudon, left its shed on 9 August, made a closed-circuit flight and returned to its base. This flight was followed by several more and the airship thereby entered the field of practical application and all eyes now turned towards lighter-than-air flight as possibly a better way of achieving human conquest of the air.

The advent of the successful airship in France was seen by many supporters of heavier-than-air flight as a calamity and the result was that between 1885 and 1889 nothing of importance was achieved in France in the field of aviation. But this ideal was never long out of the minds of the pioneers and during the next decade there were steps towards the definitive triumph, mainly because of the advent of the light internal combustion engine, even though during these five years it was the steam engine that claimed the greatest advances.

In 1883, Count de Dion, in collaboration with Georges Bouton and Charles Trépardoux, designed a light water-tube generator and engine which was used to power a light steam vehicle. Five years later the water-tube boiler, already proposed by Cayley in 1809, was taken to another level by Léon Serpollet who used extremely thin tubes, made possible by new techniques in tube-drawing. These thin tubes, when heated, caused the water they contained to evaporate instantly. It was the advent of the “flash steam generator” that made the very light steam engine possible and which very soon afterwards was used in full-size aeroplane experiments.

If between 1884 and 1889 nothing of importance was achieved in furthering human flight with machines heavier than air, the following decade, the last of the nineteenth century, saw an impressive blossoming of ideas that for the first time evolved into attempts to build and test full-sized man-carrying flying apparatuses.

Engines were now available that it was hoped would bring flight by mechanical means into the realm of the possible. There was also no shortage of soaring flight devotees and, because of the low power requirements and the possibilities of preliminary testing without an engine, these were the first to achieve free flight.