You believe wrong. The 1903 Flyer was launched via a trolley which ran on a railed track until it reached airspeed. There were no wheels on the Flyer to be dropped. In the famous photo of the first flight, you can clearly see the launching track.
You might as well claim that planes launched from aircraft carriers don’t count as aeroplanes because they don’t carry their launching catapault with them.
You believe wrong. The 1903 Flyer was launched via a trolley which ran on a railed track until it reached airspeed. There were no wheels on the Flyer to be dropped. In the famous photo of the first flight, you can clearly see the launching track.
You might as well claim that planes launched from aircraft carriers don’t count as aeroplanes because they don’t carry their launching catapault with them.
end quote …
Thanks for the information. Indeed you could claim this - it doesn’t seem unreasonable to specify that for the first ‘true’ aeroplane there should be no ‘unusual or ground-assisted launch’. That’s why Ader’s Eole is generally considered the first true powered flight rather than du Temple’s, because the latter used a ramp for launch. Of course, in the case of modern carrier aircraft the catapult or ski-jump is an aid rather than a necessity at all times!
All this simply shows the lengths people will go to to claim that their favourite was the first/most important/what-have-you, and any competitor should be ruled out on retrospective grounds which were not even considered as an issue at the time.
It is getting hard to see where this thread is leading. I presume noone disagrees with my main point - that there were several powered heavier-than-air flights before the Wrights - but that these are generally ignored because of the effect of later publicity machines.
In retrospect the most appropriate way to look at the Wright’s aeroplane is as one step on a fairly seamless progression in the achievement of heavier-than-air flight. It is important because it made considerable advances in proving control principles. Once all the principles of flight were mapped out, success depended primarily on achieving a suitable power/weight ratio, and this became possible in the decade 1900-1910.
The point was only made in support of the main discussion, which was about Lindbergh and Fame. I am sure there must be another thread somewhere if people want to discuss what constitutes a ‘first flight’. I wish we could get back to the main topic.
Erm, sort of. It’s the combined element of long-distance flight and heroic endurance that makes Lindberg’s a particularly good story; with two or more people you can sleep in shifts, or have one person fixing something while another steers and so forth. A solo flight over the ocean means that if you fall asleep the clowns will ea…erm, the plane will crash, and you can’t land anywhere (unless you’ve got one of those wussy boat-planes, of course). It all makes for good copy.
This sort of thing still exists in the form of the regular round-the-world solo boat race (and having watched Ellen Macarthur’s video diaries, the “fall asleep and you die” element very much applies there as well).
As an aside bit of trivia, Kurt Weill wrote an oratorio called The Lindbergh Flight (Der Lindberghflug) which is not bad at all, and features a rather tender aria sung by Lindburgh to his engine.
quote…
It’s the combined element of long-distance flight and heroic endurance that makes Lindberg’s a particularly good story; with two or more people you can sleep in shifts, or have one person fixing something while another steers and so forth.
end quote…
I would have thought that a solo adventure would have made for a worse story. Video diaries didn’t exist, so there was no interaction of any kind to report. Devices like singing to an engine seem to be stretching for something to say, but a two man crew lets the reporters interview both afterwards and report snippets of conversation - just the sort of human interest feature the public lap up.
Also a solo Atlantic crossing (I suppose by boat or plane) is an all or nothing affair. Either it all works ok with no drama, or you’re dead and there’s no story. Look at what you can report about Alcock and Brown - one ‘fighting the controls’ while the other was out on the wing trying to hammer the ice away from a dying engine - just the stuff that newspaper reports are made of. Fighting sleep just doesn’t have the same ring.
I think that a much better story could be made out of the Alcock and Brown flight, or out of several of the other flights where there were difficulties to overcome. With the best will in the world, staying awake for 55 hours is not a good basis for an exciting story.
It also meant an aircraft advanced enough that a single man could fly it non-stop across the Atlantic. Which meant that it had to be fast enough that he could stay awake, and reliable enough that he could keep it running without an engineer for backup.
Which is, I dare say, why people at the time thought it important enough to offer a prize for the first one to do it.
Quote…
It also meant an aircraft advanced enough that a single man could fly it non-stop across the Atlantic. Which meant that it had to be fast enough that he could stay awake, and reliable enough that he could keep it running without an engineer for backup.
Which is, I dare say, why people at the time thought it important enough to offer a prize for the first one to do it.
end quote…
Hmm, several points here.
First, I should correct an error. The Lindburg flight was 33 hours, not 55 as I mistyped earlier. That would have been some flight!
The gist of the argument above is that Lindburg was famous because solo flying meant he was the first with a swift and reliable plane, and that was sufficiently important for a prize to be awarded.
Even if the facts supported this assertion I would question why this particular level of speed and reliability was so important. We still have flight engineers for Atlantic flights, so it’s obviously no big deal to keep two persons in the cockpit. But the facts seem to show that the Spirit and the Vimy were quite similar in both respects.
The Vimy was designed 10 years before the Spirit, so you would expect it to have a slower top speed. But the specs I found give it 103 mph, as opposed to the Spirit’s 116 mph, not a lot of difference. It took 16 hours for the Vimy to cross, while the Spirit took 33 hours for a longer distance, but there was no need for anyone to stay awake for a day or more to cross the Atlantic.
The Vimy problems were not mechanical reliability (though it did lose an exhaust deflector), but ice. It ran into bad icing conditions, and Brown had to break the ice from the engine’s cooling louvres. Lindburg managed to avoid these, otherwise we would have not heard from him again. The Vimy was quite competent across the Atlantic - in 1919 Keith and Ross Smith had flown one from England to Australia, about 11,000 miles. That flight had one mechanical problem; a failed oil gauge.
Keith and Ross Smith got a £10,000 prize for the Australia flight, and coincidentally Alcock and Brown also received £10,000 - about £500,000 in todays money. It is an interesting idea to suggest measuring fame by the receipt of prizes - I don’t think this is a completely unbiased measure, and sometimes may be completely misleading, but if we accept it in this instance, I note that Lindburgh received the $25,000 Orteig award, which equates to about £5200 with the exchange rate of the time. That would suggest that Lindburg was thought about half as famous/important as Alcock and Brown?
$25,000 then is at least $250,000 now, and probably more.
Yes, that looks right, but I can’t see that it alters my comparison at all. Are you having difficulty with the difference between £ and $? Perhaps if I use the currency initials it will help. The following data is taken from the site (or cite!) below:
http://www.ex.ac.uk/~RDavies/arian/current/howmuch.html
which uses current research statistics, and is invaluable for cross-era cost comparisons. In the figures below, GBP=Great Britain Pounds, and USD=United States Dollars. (Calculation figures will vary slightly as I shall round to the nearest whole number and display 2 sig. figs.)
Vimy Prize - 10,000 GBP or 43,478 USD at the 1919 rate of 4.35 dollars to the pound
Spirit Prize - 5250 GBP or 25,000 USD at the 1927 rate of 4.76 dollars to the pound
In terms of ‘purchasing power’ (which can never be an accurate statement as implied by the figures below):
10,000 GBP in 1919 = 275,044 GBP in 2002 (My original figure, gathered from another web site, is 82% out! I suspect a $/£ mix-up again)
25,000 USD in 1927= 258,606 USD in 2002 (Your figure of ‘more than 250,000 USD’ was remarkably accurate!)
If we compare the ‘current figures’, Alcock and Brown suffer a bit with the modern lower exchange rate, but the Vimy prize is still approximately twice the Spirit prize (1.88 now as opposed to 1.9 then).
Current Spirit Prize ‘purchasing power’ - 146,602 GBP at latest GBP/USD rate ( Live mid-market rate of 1.764 as of 2003.12.21 12:51:30 GMT.)
Current Vimy Prize ‘purchasing power’ - 275,044 GBP
I’d like to make some comments about the Wright Brothers (e.g. they conducted real scientific research and testing of the principles of flight, unlike the vast majority of their contemporaries, including Chanute, Langley, etc.) but it’s too late to go into much length on that point now.
The contemporary reaction to Lindbergh’s flight had a lot to do with the times: the Roaring Twenties, a period of optimism, rapid technological advances, and prosperity. Fads and publicity stunts were rampant. It was also a time in which the first truly mass (and instantaneous) medium, radio, had achieved nearly total saturation of the industrialized world, thus allowing news to spread virtually instantly around the world.
Lindbergh was a handsome, modest, clean-cut young man who typified the rugged individualism of America. His feat entailed courage, technical skill, and risk, and he handled it well. And there was prize money involved. All these factors and more were responsible for the public acclaim he received, not merely accomplishing an aviation “first.”
Finally, Mogadon: you write well, you seem to be well informed about aviation (although I may differ with you about the importance of the Wright Brothers’ role). Would it kill you to spell Lindbergh’s name correctly?
Zoe,
Lindy did it alone, he did it in a single-engine airplane, he did it with only the most rudimentary navigation equipment, and by all rights should not have succeeded. Just the fact that he made when everyone expected him to never be seen again contributed greatly to the aura of his feat.
To reach Paris he had to stay awake for 33 hours after getting almost no sleep the night before leaving. And the single-engine in his airplane had to work flawlessly from start until finish, a rather remarkable feat for engines of that era.
The two nicknames he was most commonly known by after the flight, point out why he became famous: “Lucky Lindy” and “The Lone Eagle.” It also didn’t hurt that he was young and handsome and looked like the proto-typical All-American boy. He also did it largely on the strength of his own initiative, without government or corporate backing. (Of course he did receive seed money from the syndicate in St Louis.) But it was largely a story of one man succeeding because of grit and determination – overcoming almost unsurmountable odds.
A natural to be made into a hero by the public and media.
Best wishes,
Sky