WINGS #2

1. Did flight have any influence outside of aviation? If so, how?

After flight emerged, it began to show up in literary culture and artistic culture. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, for example, started to watch the some of the first flights that occurred in France. This sight inspired the two cubist painters to build model airplanes. Picasso was so impacted by aviation that he wrote a commentary on how important aviation was to “the defense of the nation” (p 122).

Poets and artists all over the world were fascinated by aviation and some even wanted to try. An Italian, Futuristic poet, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, believed “artists should participate in technologies that will shape the future” (p 122). Shortly after, Vasily Vasilyevich Kamensky, a Russian writer, decided to move to Paris to learn to fly in an airplane he had purchased. He ended up in an injury crash in 1912, but continued to lecture society on airplanes and continued to write Futuristic poetry. Even though Robert Delaunay, a French painter, was not at all correlated with Futuristic ideals, aviation was still incorporated in his works.

Aviation influenced songs, novels, and theater productions as well. Novels like Hike and the Airplane by Sinclair Lewis were based off real aviation stories. There were magazines, children’s books, and fictional novels all focused on aviation and the public loved it. In the theater production The Aviator by George M. Cohan, was a love story about a guy who has to prove that he is a good pilot in order to keep the girl he loves. He had previously lied that he was a pilot. In a climactic moment in the play, an actual Bleriot XI was wheeled on stage and the engine was started!

Airplanes were showing up on anything to be sold to the public. Consumer products such as glassware, clocks, cigarette cases, and pencil cases began to be tagged with the image of the airplane. Children’s toys were manufactured to be model airplanes, aeronautical games, and aviation dolls. Aviation heavily influenced the arts and popular culture when flight was coming about.

2. How did this new field of aviation affect science?

This new field of aviation drove scientists and engineers to find why and how flight actually occurred. When the Wright brother built their plane, they were meticulous in their experiments and their design, but how it worked was not completely determined. The Wright brothers did not focus on the theory or physics of the airplane, rather they focused on accomplishing flight.

Two people, John William Strutt and Daniel Bernoulli, began independently studying the physics behind flight. Strutt observed a cylinder will have resistance if put in a fluid stream. He also saw that a lifting force was created when the cylinder was spun clockwise. This forced the fluid molecules down with an equal and opposite force lifting up, as explained by Sir Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Bernoulli, on the other hand, noticed that differences in speeds between two moving streams above and below the cylinders generated a lifting force. Both of these thoughts helped to explain the dynamics of how lift is created.

The mathematical theory of flight was initiated by the German mathematician Wilhelm Kutta when he presented a paper based on Otto Lilienthal’s glider. Nikoli E. Joukowski, a Russian scientist, help further form the basis for “the circulation theory of lift” (p 125). In 1894, Frederick Lanchester presented his first paper on flight theory. Lanchester was an English engineer who was a key researcher in explaining how lift was generated solely from air circulating around a curved wing.  A little over a decade later, he published Aerial Flight which was “his most important book” (p 125).

A German engineer, Ludwig Prandtl, played a key role in the dynamics of how wind flows over the wings of a plane. He was interested in fluid dynamics and published one of the most important papers involving fluid dynamics. Prandtl said that their was a thin “boundary layer” on the wing in which there was motionless fluid. He discovered that the flow of wind was not really affected by friction from the surface because of this boundary layer. Once he discovered this, “the complex elements of wing theory fell into place over the next decade and a half” (p 125).

The field of aeronautical physics and mathematics was created for this new field of aviation.

5. In your opinion, did the Wright Brothers’ patent suits affect the progress of aviation?

The Wright Brothers’ patent suits did affect the progress of aviation, in a good way and a bad way. On the positive end of the spectrum, the Wright Brothers’ patent forced those aeronautical engineers to create planes that were new and innovative. They had to add their own little inventions and technology so that it would not infringe on the patent. This may have urged others to improve the design of the plane and, therefore, make it better. Maybe it would have taken longer if the people designing the planes just went off Wilbur and Orville’s ideas.

On the flip side, several years were wasted in patent fights for the Wright Company. While they were in the patent fights, no thoughts went into the development of the design to the Wright Brothers’ planes. Records show that “between 1909 and 1917 the firm sold only twenty-six aircraft…” (p 147). Therefore, their minds were not included into the further improvement of the airplane. With Wilbur and Orville’s ideas, the airplane might have been developed and sold quicker, especially in the United States. Also, if the Wright Brothers’ had not fought to stop all of those people whom they thought were copying their ideas, the airplane could have been developed faster. If the people that were suspected of infringing on the patent would not have been sued, they would have been able to spend that time they spent in the legal system, instead, on engineering their aircraft. Studies do show that not as many airplanes were created in the US during the patent fights. This caused the United States to drop down in the international aeronautical leadership of airplane production. I could understand why the American public thought the Wright Brothers’ patent suits delayed and hurt the development of the airplane.