At the risk of restarting a thread that went on far too long, I want to say that I had an epiphany about human flight late Christmas day thanks to a present I received (and I don't need any wise guys telling me that Epiphany isn't until January 6).
First, though, I want to present this list that I think we can all agree on, a chronology of human flight:
1) Flight of human made devices (antiquity) ? Kites, balloons, other toys for millennia.2) Sustained human flight, lighter-than-air (LTA) ? Montgolfier brothers, 1783, with a hot air balloon, followed one week later by Jacques Alexandre César Charles with a hydrogen balloon.
3) Sustained powered flight, heavier-than-air (HTA) ? Samuel Langley, late 1890's, with various subscale models of his "aerodrome" down the Potomac River. The longest flight was almost a minute and covered ~ 1/4 mile.4) Sustained, powered, controlled human flight, LTA ? Alberto Santos-Dumont, 1898 in the dirigible "No. 1", the first balloon to carry an engine, rudder and be shaped long and thin (like a ship, hence the name "airship") to allow it to be steered. Three years later, in a much-improved version, "No. 6", he cemented his title of "inventor of the airship" by winning the 100,000-franc prize offered by the Aero Club of Paris to the first airship to take off from the clubhouse field, fly to the Eiffel Tower, circle it and return to the field.
5) Sustained human flight, HTA ("Sustained" in this case means more than just an extended crash when jumping off a bridge or a cliff) ? Various glider pilots during the 1880's and 1890's, most notably Otto Lilienthal of Germany. His longest glide (off of a gently sloping hill) was about 15 seconds. He was killed in a crash in 1896. It was a newspaper story about the crash that caught the eye of Wilbur Wright and started him thinking about "the flying problem."6) Sustained, powered, controlled human flight, HTA ? Wright Brothers,
1903. The Wrights initially based their designs on the work of Langley and Lilienthal, but discarded that in favor of new directions after controlled experimentation showed the prior art to be significantly flawed.7) Sustained, powered, controlled human flight, HTA ? Alberto Santos-Dumont, 1906. Working in almost total ignorance of the Wrights, Santos-Dumont invented the "14bis", an ungainly powered box kite with a huge dihedral angle between the wings. In it's best flight it covered 720 feet in 21 seconds while remaining at least marginally in control. First HTA aircraft flight performed in public.
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OK, for Christmas I received "Wings of Madness," the new history of Alberto Santos-Dumont. I was just getting going in the book (I had only read the liner notes, Prolog and about half of the first chapter), when the following realization struck me. I believe that Santos-Dumont is the main inventor that John DeMar has his undies in a bunch over, vis-à-vis the Wrights.
You'll notice that Santos-Dumont is the only name on both the LTA and HTA lists. He was the perfect image of the late 19th Century inventor. The son of a Brazilian coffee baron, he was independently wealthy and conducted his experiments in Paris. He made all of his flights in full view of the public, fostering the publicity and notoriety that he craved (the police would often have to stop traffic along his route to prevent serious accidents as people followed him). Being independently wealthy, he had no need to patent or exploit his inventions and, in fact, gave his designs freely to anyone who wanted them so that they could continue development on parallel paths. He eagerly incoroporated the ideas of others into his designs to speed their perfection. He gave them away because he believed that if the world could be tied together by swiftly traveling airships, all of our prejudices would be exposed and thus disappear, leading us to a new utopia.
Alberto was not alone in this believe. Many of the most advanced political and technical thinkers around the turn of the last Century believed that the 20th would be the age of the common man ("common" in this case meaning we'd all be one big happy, tolerant family). By mid century, the dream of a world completely interconnected by flying machines had come true, but the prejudices remained as strong as ever.
- Jack
Jack Hagerty ARA Press