First Flight

by Cal Meacham

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the historic flight of Orville and Wilbur Wright’s plane at Kitty Hawk, and I’m sure we’ll be inundated with pictures, films, and recreations of the event. We’ll also hear about the failed attempts and those claiming to have beaten the Wright Brothers --- Gustave Whitehead in Bridgeport, Connecticut, or Burrel Cannon of Pittsburg, Texas, who built the “Ezekiel Airship” , or Clement Ader of France. (Pretty good cases can be made for some of these. For instance, a 198 reproduction of the Whitehead ship actually flew. See the Bibliography below.)

But there’s one contender who is particularly important. If you had gone to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. before 1942, you would not have found the Wright Flyer there. It was on exhibition in The Science Museum in London. The reason it was not on proud exhibition in the U.S. was because the Smithsonian had the Langley Aerodrome on display, and the placard in front of it read"...the first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained flight." The Wrights were understandably disgusted, and refused to put their own airplane on display in the same building while this usurper was in place.

But everyone knows that the Wrights were the first to fly. How could the Smithsonian - the Nation’s own museum and, one would think, cheerleader and booster of American achievement - allow such a miscarriage of justice? And what the hell as the Langley Aerodrome?

Samuel Pierpont Langley (1834-1906) was an important scientific figure in the late 19th century, an astronomer, inventor of the bolometer, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and experimenter in flight. He performed extensive experiments with parts and models, publishing this in his 1891 Experiments in Aerodynamics. He started building large unmanned models, which he called aerodromes. Although his earliest models used essentially rubber bands, his later ones used actual gasoline-powered engines. On May 6, 1896, his Aerodrome #5 was spring-launched from a houseboat on the Potomac River and flew twice, one a trip of 1,005 meters, the second of 700 meters.

Inevitably, he wished to extend his experiments and produce craft capable of carrying a human. Langley’s friend, Charles D. Walcott of the U.S. Geological Survey brought the proposal to President McKinley, and a panel convened in April 1898. It ultimately granted him $50,000 for airship research. Work began in October 1898 on what was essentially a scaled-up version of his earlier Aerodromes. The new ship was called Aerodrome A, or The Great Aerodrome. Work on the man-carrying version was completed five years later, to the month. A launch was made with the press in attendance. Again, the aerodrome was launched from a catapult on a houseboat. Instead of taking off majestically, it fell at a 45 degree angle into the water. Langley blamed the catapult for the failure. The craft was repaired and another launching as attempted on December 8, 1903. This time the plane reared up, collapsed upon itself, then plunged into the water. The pilot was trapped in the wreckage, but he was able to pull free. Langley was unable to obtain further funding. The newspapers eviscerated him, and he was bitter at the result, dying not three years later.

Walcott succeeded Langley as Secretary of the Smithsonian, and apparently he wished to preserve the good name of his colleague and the Smithsonian. In 1914 the Smithsonian contacted Glenn H. Curtiss to see if the Aerodrome could be resuscitated and flown. Curtiss was then involved in a patent lawsuit with the Wright brothers about flight, and took the commission as a way of puncturing the Wright’s claims. Wright was able to make the Aerodrome fly, albeit with extensive modifications ( see http://home.att.net/~dannysoar2/Langley.htm for details). Nevertheless, the Smithsonian annual report for 1914 claimed that the Aerodrome had flown “without modification”. The 1915 report stated that “..the tests thus far made have shown that former Secretary Langley had succeeded in building the first aeroplane capable of sustained free flight with a man.” The claim was repeated in many Smithsonian publications afterwards, and eventually the Aerodrome was put on display with a placard that noted that it was “the first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained flight.” As the Smithsonian’s own National Air and Space Museum website now notes, diplomatically: “The Aerodrome A had, indeed, existed before the Wright brothers' successful 1903 Flyer, but it only flew much later and even then in heavily modified form, making the Smithsonian claim inappropriate at best.”

Printed notices of the modifications soon became available, however, but these did not elicit a retraction from the Smithsonian. Orville Wright (Wilbur had died in 1912 of typhus), in retaliation, sent the original Wright Flyer to the Science Museum in London. It was not until 1942 that a new regime at the Smithsonian retracted the claims for the Langley Aerodrome. In 1948 the Wright Flyer was finally brought home from London and it’s been on display at the Smithsonian ever since.

(By the way, Curtiss lost the suit. Curtiss’ company and Wright’s company joined to make Curtiss-Wright, an important airplane manufacturer until the 1950s.)

So, Langley’s fullsize craft was not the first powered heavier-than-air craft to carry a human, but surely Langley should get credit for the first heavier-than-air craft to fly under its own power, right?

No. Even discounting those other characters mentioned at the beginning of this essay, Langley was beaten by a healthy margin of over fifty years.

I first heard about Henson and Stringfellow in the 1965 movie The Flight of the Phoenix, when Hardy Kruger’s character, Heinrich Dorfmann, states that, years before the Wright brothers flew, “Henson and Stringfellow built a rubber-band-powered aircraft that flew for forty meters before encountering an obstruction.” I wanted to know who Henson and Stringfellow were, and why I’d never heard of them before. Their story is fascinating, and I found that the sentence that introduced them to me was riddled with errors.

William Samuel Henson (1805- 1888) and John Stringfellow (1799-1883) were a couple of British flying-machine enthusiasts. In 1842 Henson patented his “Aerial Steam Carriage” and proposed setting up a company called the Aerial Steam Transit Company to handle passengers and freight by air, despite the fact that they didn’t have a working airplane, or even a model. They were followers of the writings of Sir George Cayley, who had laid down many of the principles of powered flight in 1809-1810. They built several models, but none of them flew. Nevertheless, they issued promotional brochures and scarves (http://www.first-to-fly.com/History%20Images/Arial_Transit_Promo_r.jpg and http://www.pilotfriend.com/century-of-flight/Aviation%20history/to%20reality/Henson%20and%20Stringfellow.htm ), probably to help raise funding. Some websites leave the story there, implying no successes resulted (i.e. - this one: http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Dictionary/Stringfellow/DI45.htm ).

Henson quit the business and emigrated to the US in 1848, but Stringfellow carried on alone. In spite of the fact that it was Henson who patented the Ariel an initiated the company, Stringfellow was the older of the two and had been working on flying machines longer. He built his own balloon at an early age, flying it over Chard in Somerset, where his family had moved to in hopes of finding refuge from the Luddites. He had been born in Attercliff, near Sheffield, and his father, William Stringfellow, was nominally a cutler, but in practice was skilled in a great many mechanical and scientific arts. John seems to have inherited the abilities.

After Henson’s departure, Stringfellow developed a lightweight steam engine to power flying craft. He designed a monoplane with swallow-shaped wings, rather than the rectangular ones Henson had designed (and as the Wright Brothers would eventually use), reasoning that these would have lower drag. There was a delta-shaped horizontal tail, but no vertical tail. The forward impetus was provided by two counter-rotating propellers, one on each side at the back. In appearance, it seems more modern than Langley’s or the Wright’s devices, with its curved monoplane wing and flat tail. All it seems to lack is a vertical fin. Without this, it had little left-right stability, so Stringfellow did his testing in the still air of barns or tents.

The size of this machine is hard to pin down, since accounts of it disagree. It weighed “under nine pounds” or “6 ½ pounds, with fuel”. Its wingspan was given as ten feet from tip to tip (although measurements based on photographs suggest 12 feet), but the machine narrowed to 2 feet. Its surface area was variously given as 14 or 17 square feet.

The exact date of he first flight does not seem to be recorded, but it was in the summer of 1848. The first flight was inside a silk mill, in a space not much wider than the machine’s wingspan and 22 yards long, with a canvas at the end to act as a stop. Stringfellow considered using a ramp as a means of takeoff, but changed his mind and constructed a guidewire with a two-wheeled carrier to which his model was attached by an ingenious self-detaching mechanism.

On its first trial the tail was set at too steep an angle, and upon its release from the guidewire the model rose too fast, stalled, and slid back onto the tail, breaking it. They replaced the tail and reset the angle. Steam was “got up” again, the model released, and this time it flew all the way to the canvas stop, tearing a hole in it.

Stringfellow ran a great many tests, described in later years by his son, who reported that the machine climbed as fast as one part in every seven horizontal. A public demonstration was given on Augus 1, 1848, in a specially-constructed tent at Cremorne Gardens in Chelsea. Despite some initial wavering, the model flew 40 yards before striking the canvas stop.

Sadly, the experiments were costly and, although of immense potential value, they were a far cry from the promised capabilities of the Aerial Steam Transit Company. With funding difficult to find (Henson, before he left, had even appealed to Cayley for funds, unsuccessfully), the project was lost to public view. Stringfellow continued to work on his models, but nothing was seen on the public stage until the Aeronautical Exposition at the Crystal Palace in London in 1868, when he showed his tri-plane design. He and his son continued to work on models, but never pressed on to manned flight.

There have been, I’m told, skeptics who do not believe Stringfellow achieved powered flight, but it is generally acknowledged that he did succeed (modern models have been made on his design, and successfully flown). It’s understandable that there are no photos of his flights. In fact, it’s amazing that we have a couple of photographs of his flyer. What’s really surprising is that his work is so little known, or appreciated.

So John Stringfellow was he first to build an engine-powered, heavier-than-air craft, right? And the first real man-made flight occurred in 1848.

Wrong. In 1842, six years earlier than Stringfellow’s flight, W.H. Phillips of Britain produced a flyer powered by steam jets. The jets were powered by a burning mixture of charcoal, nitre, and gypsum, and they emerged from he tips of the rotors of the first steam-powered helicopter. It weighed twenty pounds and reportedly “flew up fast and crossed two fields.” (from Aviation by Charles H. Gibbs-Smith, 1970. Quoted in Fay). Vittorio Sarti of Italy had attempted to build a steam-powered helicopter in 1828, but without success. Philips’ “engine” was really just a rotor with angled vents at the end, like Hero’s aeropile, so it is not a reciprocating engine, like that built by Stringfellow. Still, Phillips’ helicopter was the first steam-powered heavier-than-air craft.

If you don’t limit the power source to such powered engines, however, there were several helicopters powered by springs, tension bars, and the like. Cayley himself built one in 1796 (http://www.aerospaceweb.org/design/helicopter/history.shtml ), but he was preceded by the Frenchmen Launoy and Bienvenu, who demonstrated a whalebone-powered double-rotored helicopter at the Academie des Sciences in 1784.

Of course, the very first heavier-than-air craft we have a record of didn’t have any sort of motor power. Toy “helicopters” consisting of a stick with a rotor on top, to be rotated between the palms or with a string are still available at toy stores and Museum shops. They were first recorded circa 320 CE by the Taoist alchemist Ko Hung in his Pao Phu Tzu.(Some websites attribute the design to Ko Hung, but it is clear from the text that he is describing an already-existing device.) How long before that it appeared is anyone’s guess, and its inventor (probably inspired by watching falling seed cases, like those of the maple) unknown. Who, for that matter, built the first paper airplane?