Unlocking the Sky by Seth Shulman

Author:Seth Shulman
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780061846939
Publisher: HarperCollins

For the AEA, the path to a working airplane has been remarkably swift, with surprisingly few missteps.

By December 1907, the group completed its first glider, the Cygnet, based on the unusual tetrahedral glider design Bell favored. The Cygnet was a fifty-foot-wide array of more than three thousand fabric-covered tetrahedral cells set into an aluminum frame. Bell developed the design, which looked like an oversized, triangular honeycomb, on the sensible theory that the small, pyramidlike openings would provide lift, even at relatively low speeds. On December 6, 1907, the team put the Cygnet on floats and, attaching it by a long cable, towed it behind the lake steamer Blue Hill on Nova Scotia’s pristine Bras d’Or Lake. The Cygnet, pulled behind the boat, carried the daring Lieutenant Selfridge 168 feet into the air and remained aloft above the lake for seven minutes. In the excitement, though, the boat crew forgot to cut the line to the glider. As a result, when the steamer slowed, the Cygnet landed gracefully on the lake only to be dragged roughly through the water until it tipped over and broke up. Selfridge dove clear just in time to escape injury, but the Cygnet, painstakingly constructed over many weeks, was beyond repair.

As the AEA members had agreed, Selfridge oversaw the next attempt. After much discussion, he helped nudge the group away from Bell’s complex design to experiment with the comparatively simple biplane glider long championed by Octave Chanute. The Cygnet showed promise, he argued, but it was cumbersome. With a unanimous desire to “get into the air” as quickly as possible, the group returned to first aeronautical principles for two productive months of experimentation with gliders modeled after Chanute’s biplanes.

From the start, Selfridge wrote, the object of the AEA was “to walk in the footprints of those who had gone before and then advance beyond.” Selfridge solicited advice from a wide range of colleagues, including everyone from William Avery, Chanute’s assistant, to the Wrights themselves. In a letter to the brothers in January 1908, Selfridge asked if they might share some particular information about their understanding of where the center of pressure fell on a wing. Wilbur’s reply, offering some advice and referring Selfridge to several other sources, would later be used by the Wrights as evidence that the AEA stole their invention, but the charge is all but baseless. While helpful, Wilbur’s letter did little but confirm what the group was quickly learning on its own.

In the effort to glean as much extant knowledge as possible, the AEA was aided by its decision to move from Nova Scotia to Curtiss’s Hammondsport shop. Not only could the group take advantage of the milder climate; they were stimulated by the large number of aviation researchers who had gravitated to the town. With the lure of Curtiss’s motors, Bell exclaimed, no other place on earth could boast “such an assemblage of genius along the line of aerial work as Hammondsport.”

Captain Baldwin, at work building his latest dirigible for the U.

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