Posted
on August 22, 2014
You
may have heard about Wilbur and Orville Wright as the guys who
invented powered flight (in other words, airplanes). But surely you
know that lots of other people were fiddling around with their own
designs and inventions for powered flight at the same time.
Today's
famous birthday, Samuel Pierpont Langley, born on this date in 1834,
seemed likely to succeed over the others—even over the Wright
brothers. Langley was an American astronomer and physicist, and his
unmanned tandem-wing plane flew 4,200 feet in late 1896. It was such
a promising start that the U.S. War Department gave him $50,000 to
develop a piloted airplane. The Smithsonian pitched in an additional
$20,000.
Langley
decided that it would be safest to fly over water, so he spent almost
half of the start-up money building a houseboat and a catapult on the
houseboat.
A
cat-a-what?
A
catapult is a contraption that is designed to hurl an object into the
air. Langley's aircraft needed to go from a dead stop to 60
miles-per-hour, the speed necessary for flight, in just 70 feet.
Since that would be impossible to do with the engines then available,
Langley decided that a catapult would be needed to achieve the speed.
You
probably know that most modern airplanes use long runways so that
they can slowly achieve the speed needed for flight. Most runways are
at least 6,000 feet long.
But Langley's idea wasn't completely
cuckoo; modern aircraft carriers sit on the ocean and use four
catapults to launch airplanes into the air. And floating platforms
for launching planes were used within ten years of the invention of
the airplane.
 |
| Langley's tandem-wing aircraft had one wing forward and one wing behind, rather than two wings stacked. |
Still, Langley did not succeed with his idea. His airplane, which he called
an aerodrome, had a more powerful motor than that used by the Wright
brothers, but both of his test flights ended in disaster.
The first
flight, on October 7, 1903, ended when the wing of the plane clipped
the catapult and the aerodrome plunged into the river...A reporter
wrote that the plane flew “like a handful of mortar.”
The second flight, on December 8, 1903, ended when the rear wing and
tail broke apart as it left the catapult. This time, the engineer /
test pilot almost drowned in the Potomac River...but was (thankfully)
rescued.
Some
reporters and readers poked fun at the aerodromes' failures. A worker
from the War Department concluded that Langley was still far from the
goal of powered, controlled flight—and that it would take a team of
experts and many more thousands of dollars to reach the goal.
 |
| Notice that the Wright brothers built an airplane with "stacked wings." This is called a biplane. |
But
then, just a few days later, on December 17, 1903, the Wright
Brothers achieved the goal with an airplane that cost just $1,000 to
build!
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