The Published Writings of Wilbur and Orville Wright by Peter L. Jakab

Author:Peter L. Jakab [Jakab, Peter L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58834-549-3
Publisher: Smithsonian
Published: 2016-06-21T04:00:00+00:00

1. Address presented at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia on May 20, 1914, on the occasion of Orville Wright’s receipt of the Institute’s Elliott Cresson Medal in recognition of his pioneering work in aeronautics, published in Aeronautics, September 15, 1914, 67–68, 78.

2. The center of pressure is the point between the leading and the trailing edges of a wing surface at which the lifting force acting on the wing is focused. The center of pressure naturally moves back and forth along the wing with the changing angle of attack.

3. “Plane surfaces” are perfectly flat surfaces with no curvature in profile.

4. “Camber” refers to the curvature of a wing profile.

5. This was the method used by Otto Lilienthal.

6. See document 28, note 16.

7. Orville is referring to Alphonse Pénaud.

8. The Wrights’ interest in developing an automatic stability device began as early as 1905. In 1913 Orville received a patent for an automatic pilot system using a vane-and-pendulum design. On February 5, 1914, three months before delivering this address, he was awarded the prestigious Collier Trophy for this advancement to aeronautics. His was a short-lived moment of glory, however. The Wright system worked but was immediately supplanted by the much superior gyroscope-based automatic pilot system developed by Lawrence Sperry and unveiled in June 1914. The Sperry gyroscope became the standard automatic stability system thereafter.

9. The “powerful mechanism” was a servomotor powered by a wind-driven generator.

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