Authors: Tom D. Crouch
The Bishop's Boys (50 page)
As a result, the Wright control system remained a puzzle to the French. Those who read the articles carefully noticed the references to wing warping, but the precise meaning of the phrase and the way in which it was accomplished were a mystery. The experience of one newcomer, Robert Esnault-Pelterie, was typical.
A nineteen-year-old graduate of the Sorbonne, Esnault-Pelterie made his first flights in “an exact copy” of the 1902 Wright glider near Paris in May 1904. “A great stride seemed to have been taken [by the Wright brothers] in this difficult and delicate question of the conquest of the air,” he explained in
L’Aérophile
. “We confess that the magnificent results reported on the other side of the Atlantic have left us a little skeptical. But skepticism has no place in science. When an experiment seems surprising, there is a very simple means of resolving the doubts, and that is to repeat the experiment.”
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The young engineer “scrupulously follow[ed] the instructions, directions and diagrams of the Wrights which were published in
L’Aérophile.”
The glider was “exactly like that of the American experimenters, in general dimensions, wing curvature, and the arrangement of the controls.” In fact, Esnault-Pelterie used the wrong camber and could only guess at the control system. He installed wing warping, then abandoned it, fearing that the technique “magnified tensions on the wires.”
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The machine’s performance was disappointing. Certain that the Wright claims were exaggerated, Esnault-Pelterie rebuilt his craft, substituting weight shifting as the primary means of control. In so doing, he was forced to substantially reduce the total surface area. In addition, he reduced the camber to 1/50 and did away with the classic Wright canard.
In addition to weight shifting, he added twin experimental
élevons
(ailerons) mounted at the midpoint of the forward struts. These surfaces, operated by hand wheels, were intended to control the glider in both pitch (when used in unison) and roll (when used in opposition).
During a long series of tests that October, Esnault-Pelterie mounted the glider on a small dolly and was towed into the air by an automobile. While the flights were generally more successful than those conducted in May, the experience convinced him that the automatic stability provided by wing dihedral, in which the wingtips were angled up from the fuselage, was superior to any attempt at active roll control.
His colleagues agreed. Automatic or inherent stability was the goal of virtually all the early European experimenters before 1908. Their most successful machine, the classic Voisin of 1907–08, retained all the external features of the Wright airplane (biplane, pusher, canard). In terms of control, however, it was a much more primitive and dangerous craft.
Gabriel Voisin, the young man who built and flew that machine, made his first flight in March 1904 aboard a glider belonging to Ernest Archdeacon. Archdeacon, with his wealth and influence, had replaced Ferdinand Ferber as the dominant figure on the French aeronautical scene. Inspired by Ferber’s
type de Wright
gliders of 1902 and 1903, and by the news of the Wrights’ success with their powered machine in 1903, he commissioned a glider of his own in January 1904.
L’Aérophile
described it as “an
aéroplane de type Wright
1902,” and noted that “apart from subsequent modifications,” it was “exactly copied from that of the Wright brothers.”
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Those modifications were considerable. The original wingspan was reduced from 32 feet to 24 feet 7¼ inches, and the wing area, roughly 301–305 square feet in the original, to only 237 square feet. The empty weight of 112–117 pounds fell to 75 pounds. While the precise camber employed by Archdeacon is not known, it was clearly much deeper than that of the Wright machine. Most important, the 1904 Archdeacon glider did not incorporate wing warping, and featured a modified elevator.
The craft was certainly far sturdier and closer to the Wright original than anything Ferber had built to date. That was to be expected, for the 1904 Archdeacon glider was constructed at the government balloon and airship facility at Chalais Meudon with the advice and assistance of the commandant, Colonel Charles Renard, one of the great French airship pioneers.
Renard’s personal involvement in the Archdeacon project might have marked the beginning of a serious, government-sponsored heavier-than-air flight research program. Unfortunately, at the moment when interest in military aeronautics was blossoming in other European nations, antimilitarist sentiment and budget cuts eroded the French program. Discouraged by reduced allocations, humiliated by his own failure to win election to the Academy of Sciences, Renard took his own life on April 13, 1905.
Archdeacon shipped his glider to a test site at Merlimont, near Berck-sur-Mer, in the spring of 1904. His test pilot was a twenty-five-year-old student of architecture—Gabriel Voisin. A native of Belleville, near Beaujeau, he was a dashing fellow, and something of a ladies’ man.
In later years Voisin took delight in describing the conquests of his youth, which included Marie, a “glorious blonde” seventeen-year-old schoolgirl whose “every gesture” he found “infinitely graceful,” as well as an interchangeable series of housekeepers, seamstresses, dental assistants, postmistresses, landladies, prostitutes, and errant wives. Somehow, Voisin found time to experiment with boats, kites, automobiles, and engines. “My life,” he recalled, “was full, and I never knew boredom.”
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Early in 1900, while employed as a draftsman by the firm constructing the buildings to house the Universal Exposition due to open in Paris that spring, he came across a group of workmen assembling Clément Ader’s
Avion
in one of the exhibition galleries. Fascinated, he clambered into the cockpit. From that moment, his life would never be the same.
In my hands were the mysterious controls which could give life to this incomparable creation. To my right and to my left I saw the mechanism which would drive the airscrew blades. The steam generator need only to be lit to animate this marvel…. Suspended on a tackle, the huge bird was gently lifted and swung from side to side. Why was it in this place? Why was it not up in the sky flying over us and our petty activities?
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Three years later, in the fall of 1903, Voisin was introduced to Colonel Renard. Impressed by the young man’s enthusiasm, Renard passed his name on to Archdeacon as a potential test pilot.
Voisin first flew the Archdeacon glider from the dunes at Berck-sur-Mer on Easter Sunday, 1904. He made flights of up to twenty-five seconds in length, but ended the day so battered that Archdeacon cabled Ferber in Nice inviting him to give the
nouveau aviateur
some flight instruction.
Ferber arrived several days later. Voisin was pleased to report that his instructor “did not succeed in his trials and bent everything badly.” The two continued to fly through the first two weeks of April, improving with practice. Archdeacon brought a professional photographer out to the dunes, and sent photo postcards showing his machine in the air to the members of the Aéro-Club.
At the end of the two-week gliding session, Archdeacon was “full of enthusiasm.” He announced that Voisin had mastered the craft, completing flights of over sixty-five feet. The information obtained would be used to design an improved glider that would allow him “to do as well as the Wright brothers.”
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Most of the members of the Aéro-Club shared his confidence. Now that Frenchmen had taken to the air, the world would see some real progress. And what better way to encourage development than to offer financial rewards to the most successful experimenters? By the fall of 1904, a series of rich prizes stood as benchmarks on the road toward the final victory.
The Coupe d’Aviation Ernest Archdeacon, a silver trophy valued at 2,000 francs, would go to the first man to pilot a powered airplane 25 meters (80 feet) through the air. Each of the first ten men to fly at least 60 meters would receive 100 francs and a silver medal from the Aéro-Club de France. Archdeacon would present 1,500 francs to the first pilot to complete a flight of 100 meters (330 feet). That lucky fellow would earn an additional 1,500 francs for capturing the Aéro-Club’s Prix pour Record de Distance. Together, Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe and Archdeacon established an aptly named Grand Prix d’Aviation of 50,000 francs for the first flight of one kilometer over a circular course. The man who won that prize would have flown—by anyone’s standards.
Gabriel Voisin was determined to be that man. In the spring of 1905, he was at work on a second glider for Archdeacon. Encouraged by the trials at Berck, Archdeacon had formed a new company, Syndicat d’Aviation, and hired Voisin as the chief engineer and sole employee.
They set out to build yet another “exact replica” of the 1902 Wright glider, the most successful machine known to them. Unaware that they were basing their craft on incorrect information, they assumed that its failure to match the reputed performance of the original was proof that the Wright claims were overblown.
In designing a second craft, they retained some external features of the Wright glider (biplane wings and forward elevator), but rejected three-axis control in favor of inherent stability achieved through the use of a three-cell box kite as the main lifting surface and a two-cell kite as a tail. The glider would be towed down a wooden rail and into the air by an automobile.
Voisin began testing the new craft in April 1905. Archdeacon, “who knew how to open the most difficult doors,” obtained War Department permission to use Issy-les-Moulineaux, an abandoned military parade ground north of Paris, as a flying field. The first test was scheduled for March 25. Voisin was eager to go up, but Archdeacon insisted that an unmanned test be conducted first with sand ballast in lieu of a pilot. It was a wise decision. The craft rose to an altitude of thirty feet and broke apart in the air. “Without this preliminary trial,” Voisin remarked, “Issy would only have seen me on this one occasion.” He spent the next two months rebuilding the craft with a set of floats. For safety’s sake Archdeacon decided to conduct all future tests over water.
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A small crowd of spectators lined the banks of the Seine between the Billancourt and Sèvres bridges on the afternoon of June 8 to watch Voisin fly the new glider. By three o’clock the machine had been towed into midstream and attached to the speedboat
La Rapière
. Voisin, secure in his saddle, ordered the boat into motion. “I had the controls ready,” he recalled fifty years later. “I waited for a time and then I applied elevator.” The glider rose from the water, reaching an altitude of perhaps sixty feet. The boat slowed as it approached the bridge, allowing the craft to settle gently back onto the surface after a flight of some 2,000 feet.
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Early the following morning one of those who had witnessed the spectacle called on Voisin. Louis Blériot was in the market for a flying machine. A thirty-three-year-old manufacturer of automobile headlamps, Blériot was a striking man, sturdily built, with a dark face and heavy features. His sweeping mustache, clear, deepset eyes, and high cheekbones led more than one observer to remark on his resemblance to an ancient Gallic chieftain. Frédérick Collin, his mechanic, thought that Blériot’s prominent nose, giving him a birdlike profile, might be evidence of predestination.
Blériot had caught the flying-machine bug while still a student, but kept his enthusiasm in check “for fear of being taken for a fool.” Having seen Voisin in the air, he could no longer resist the urge to fly. Voisin accepted Blériot’s money and built a glider to his new client’s order, in spite of the fact that he regarded the design as dangerously unstable.
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Voisin tested both the rebuilt Archdeacon machine and the new Blériot glider on July 19. On the first trial an inexperienced towboat operator took off down the river “like a mad thing,” damaging the Archdeacon craft. Lifting off the surface aboard the Blériot craft a few minutes later, Voisin immediately realized that the glider was just as unstable as he had feared. It rocked violently from side to side a few times, then dropped off on one wing and entered the water less than 100 feet from the spot where it had taken off. The machine was destroyed and Voisin barely escaped with his life. Far from discouraged, Blériot and Voisin, who was anxious to leave the ranks of hired mechanics, entered the flying-machine business as full partners three days after the trials.
While Esnault-Pelterie, Voisin, and Blériot were just beginning their work, Ferdinand Ferber was approaching the end of his. That spring he made the world’s first glider flight with a passenger, his mechanic. While the newspapers made much of this, it was scarcely calculated to advance aeronautical technology.
The machine was his now standard
type de Wright
glider, this one featuring triangular wingtip “rudders” and a fixed horizontal stabilizer resembling the spread feathers of a bird’s tail. Ferber altered the glider in May 1905, adding a 6-hp Peugeot engine and a small propeller mounted on the forward elevator support. The craft was totally incapable of sustained flight. After three years of effort, Ferber was farther from the Wrights, and success, than when he started.
The year 1906 was as promising for the French as it was disappointing for the Wrights. The list of enthusiasts continued to grow. Rumanian-born Trajan Vuia unveiled a tractor monoplane powered by a 23-hp Serpollet carbonic-acid gas engine at Montesson, near Paris, on March 3. You had to look closely to see the Wright influence, but it was there. Unlike his colleagues, Vuia used both wing warping and the canard elevator.
He made three short hops on March 3, August 12, and August 19, rebuilt the craft, then made eight more hops from Issy and Bagatelle with his new
I-bis
configuration between October 6, 1906, and March 30, 1907. The best of these covered only ten meters. The Vuia II, which followed in 1907, was little more successful than its predecessor.
The Danish experimenter J. C. R. Ellehammer coaxed his monoplane through a 42-meter tethered flight over the circular track at Lindholm on September 12, 1906. Ellehammer and Vuia did not achieve sustained flight, but they did popularize the monoplane configuration, inspiring others, notably Blériot and Levavaseur, who were just entering the field.