Seven Miles per Hour

Robert Macfarlane

First to Fly: The Unlikely Triumph of Wilbur and Orville Wright by James Tobin
Murray, 431 pp, £9.99, November 2003, ISBN 0 7195 5738 0
The Wright Brothers: The Aviation Pioneers who Changed the World by Ian Mackersey
Little, Brown, 554 pp, £20.00, October 2003, ISBN 0 316 86144 8
Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight by Paul Hoffman
Fourth Estate, 369 pp, £18.99, June 2003, ISBN 1 84115 368 0
Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age from Antiquity to the First World War by Richard Hallion
Oxford, 531 pp, £20.00, September 2003, ISBN 0 19 516035 5

It’s hard, in our age of budget flights and short hops, to appreciate the glamour of early aviation. Yet for fifteen years or so – from the late 1890s until the opening months of the Great War – powered flight was one of modernity’s greatest romances.

Wilbur and Orville Wright, bicycle makers from Ohio, became famous as the Wright Brothers, but at first it was only Wilbur who had what he called the ‘disease’, the ‘belief that flight is possible to man’. He spent much of 1899, when he was 32, steeping himself in the literature of aeronautics; he scrutinised the flight patterns of hawks, buzzards and pigeons; he assembled and flew kites. And, on a drawing board in the spare room of the family shop, he tackled the three large-scale problems that impeded him: how to build wings of sufficient lift, how to build an engine which reconciled lightness and power, and how to balance and steer the aircraft once it was in motion.

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Vol. 26 No. 3 · 5 February 2004 » Robert Macfarlane » Seven Miles per Hour (print version)
Pages 23-24 | 2664 words

Letters

From Fred Starr

Am I the only anorak among your readers to have noticed the howler at the head of Robert Macfarlane's piece about the Wright Brothers and Santos Dumont (LRB, 5 February)? 'Seven miles per hour' was the speed over the ground, not speed through the air. It was pretty windy on the day! Given the drag-inducing aerodynamics of the Wright Flyer and its minimal engine power, actual airspeed was a commendable 31 miles an hour. Further on, we have another instance of technical illiteracy in the statement that the slight twist in the wing of the Boeing 747 enables it to turn, just like the wing-warping system did on the aircraft built by the Wrights. This 'twist' is a feature called 'washout', which virtually all swept-wing aircraft need to avoid stalling of the wingtips when flying at low speeds or at high Mach numbers. Finally, it isn't true to say that Otto Lilienthal died because his glider was unstable. It was because he relied on weight-shifting for steering. The Wrights designed their aircraft to be unstable, knowing that with good controls, like wing-warping and rudders, they would be as easy to fly as the bicycles that the Wrights had taught themselves to ride and went on to manufacture.

Fred Starr
London SW16

From Michael Carley

Fred Starr is not the only anorak to have noticed the shortfall in Robert Macfarlane's technical expertise (Letters, 19 February). Unfortunately, he commits an error of his own when he claims that 'the Wrights designed their aircraft to be unstable.' The book forming the basis of stability theory was not published until 1911, and the theory was not placed on a sound footing until thirty years after the Wrights' first flight in 1903.

Michael Carley
Bath

From Lanny Anderson

Robert Macfarlane is wrong to assert that Orville Wright was the first man to fly an aeroplane. Karl Jatho made the first powered flight, of sixty feet, over the Vahrenwalder Heide on 18 August 1903. Three months later, in November 1903, his aircraft 'soared' for 262 feet at an altitude of over nine feet. Both flights took place before Wright's on 17 December 1903.

Lanny Anderson
Richmond, Virginia

From Robert Macfarlane

Lanny Anderson writes to correct my assertion that Orville Wright was the first man to fly an aeroplane, claiming the prize for Karl Jatho (Letters, 4 March). There are at least six other heavier-than-air flight pioneers who have been credited with being the first to fly; all come before Jatho. The criteria most aeronautic historians have applied when awarding the 'first to fly' medal are: first, that the event must involve a craft which could sustain its flight only because of the power of its engine, and which was fitted with a control system allowing the pilot to maintain his course; second, that the flight must be well documented by first-hand witnesses; and, finally, that the flight must be repeatable. Jatho and the six other contenders all fail on at least one of these criteria.

Robert Macfarlane
Cambridge