Learning to Fly in the U.S. Army
9781465686213
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
That part of the history of Aviation which has especial interest for aviators is of recent date, and extends back only two dozen years. Of course efforts have been made toward manflight ever since the early sixteenth century, when Leonardo da Vinci invented the parachute and became the first patron of aeronautics; between the time of this famous artist and the present many experimenters have given their attention to the problem, but previous to the last decade of the nineteenth century nothing practical was achieved. Then, with the perfection of the steam engine and the development of the gasoline engine, there came inducement to sound experimentation, bringing forth such well-known figures as Maxim, Langley, Lillienthal and Chanute. The work of each of these men is an interesting story by itself, especially that of Langley, who approached the matter from a strictly scientific viewpoint, established testing apparatus and built successful self-propelled steam models years before the Wright brothers reported their independent successes. He reproduced his models to full scale with every expectation of success, but failed, due to exhaustion of his capital. Langley’s Experiments in Aerial Navigation.—In all the history of aerial navigation one of the most romantic stories is that describing the scientific researches begun in 1887 by Langley and culminating in 1896 in the first really successful case of mechanical flight using a prime mover; continuing up to 1903 when this first successful machine, a model of 12-ft. span, was reproduced to full scale and manned for its trial flight by a human pilot; and ending with the destruction of this full-sized machine on launching, so that Langley missed the glory of being the actual discoverer of manflight only by a hair’s breadth, dying shortly afterward of a broken heart, as is conceded by those who knew him. If this full-scale machine had performed as successfully in 1903 as it actually did after being rebuilt and partly remodelled a decade later by the Curtiss company, Langley would have antedated the first successful flight made by the Wright brothers by a narrow margin of about 2 months.
