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 ick
Engler is an author, a pilot, and craftsman. He has written over
fifty books, has taught wood technology at the University of
Cincinnati and aviation history at Sinclair University. He works
with young people to build historic aircraft and has devised several
educational STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)
programs around these adventures in pioneer aeronautics, including
our Secret of Flight school tours. These activities have
earned him several commendations from the State of Ohio and a
national award for innovation in education from the American
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Nick has also
appeared in several documentaries on the Wright brothers and pioneer
aviation, including two-hour PBS special, The Wright Brothers: A
Journey of Invention. "I'm not an historian although I play one
on TV," he explains. "What I am is an experimental archaeologist."
Experimental archaeology is a branch of archaeology that studies
historic and prehistoric events by recreating them. "The best known
examples are scholars who 'knap' flint, exploring how primitive
peoples made stone tools. I've applied this same concept to
industrial archaeology," he says, referring to another discipline
which studies the origins of technology. "We built and flew the
Wright brothers experimental airplanes
– all the aircraft they made between 1899 and 1905
– to experience for ourselves
the scientific, engineering, and piloting problems that the Wright
brothers faced." His team of experimental archaeologists (who call
themselves the Wright Brothers Aeroplane Company) became the first
group to reproduce all of the Wright brothers experimental
aircraft since the Wrights themselves.
"We don't just study aviation history," says Nick. "We live it."
Interview Questions (so far)
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Nick Engler is a member of the Wright Brothers Aeroplane Company and
was Director and Chief Builder during the time we were building and
flying the Wright's experimental airplanes. He has committed to help
grow this page, lengthening the interview as he gets more questions.
If you have questions for him,
contact us.
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How has the airplane
changed the world?
There must be a popular lesson plan somewhere with this question
in it because I get it all the time. And I have to say – with all
due respect to the person who wrote it – this is an awful question.
There are two reasons I say this. First, it's much too broad for me
to give a worthwhile answer. You ask general questions, you get
general answers – better known as "fluff." The purpose of an
interview is to ask insightful questions, questions that provoke a
creative, revealing answer. To make up insightful questions, you
must have some insight yourself. That is, you have to understand
something about the subject. A much better lesson plan would have
been to tell you to read one of the many overviews of aviation
history there are on the web. That will clue you in on how the
airplane changed the world. Then ask some questions about the
effects of aviation that peak your curiosity and get
some answers that interest you. That geezer who wrote
the lesson plan – you probably wouldn't be caught dead listening to
the kind of music he likes, would you? Why parrot his questions?
The second reason is that this question makes a presumption about
technology that just isn't so. It presumes that a single technology
– airplanes – causes a change that you can define. This is called
"linear thought." You line up your causes and effects in nice, neat
little lines and say, "This is what happened." It's an absolutely
miserable and boring way to think about technology or history or
anything else. The way in which technology effects the world is much
messier, more interesting, and full of surprises. A single change
comes from a thousand different sources and it can become the source
of a thousand further changes, many of which we can't possibly
foresee. Let me give you two examples.
Home remedies and folk medicine made it possible for the
Wright brothers to fly. It's true. When petroleum was first
discovered in the 1850s, it was refined to make lamp oil. Gasoline
was a worthless by-product of the refining process. Snake-oil
salesmen hauled it away and passed it off as a liniment to be rubbed
on sore muscles and other afflictions. Soon it was commonly
available as such in apothecaries (early drug stores) and general
stores. In about twenty years, Nikolaus Otto and several other
inventors noticed it made a much better fuel than it did a liniment.
If he hadn't had easy access to gasoline, if the oil men had just
thrown it away, gasoline engines might have been a long time coming.
But of course they weren't; gasoline engines had been developing for
about thirty years when the Wright brothers discovered that they
needed one and a couple of gallons of gas to run it.
Airplanes have made Central America a big player in the
flower trade. Do you realize that most carnations (and many
other flowers) that are for sale in the United States are flown here
daily from growers in Central American countries? Airplanes are
commonly used to deliver flowers, seafood, transplant organs, and
many other commodities that have to get where they are going in a
hurry. So the correct answer to "How has the airplane changed the
world?" is that "It has enabled me to send my grandmothers flowers
from Costa Rica." Of course, there are are a thousand other answers
that are just as correct – and just as surprising.
Really, How
has the airplane changed
the world?
Okay, okay. The answer that your teacher probably wants is that
there isn't a single human endeavor that hasn't been affected by
aviation. It has changed the way we travel, how we distribute food
and goods, how we respond to emergencies, how we interact with
people in other countries, how we wage war, and how we enjoy peace.
Most importantly, it has changed how we view the world – and
ultimately, ourselves. Before aviation, even the best maps showed
our earth with lines and boundaries separating the people in one
country from people in another. After aviation, men and women could
see the world from above. The artificial boundaries disappeared; the
earth looked continuous; the people felt more connected. Even
natural barriers such as oceans and mountains began to mean less
starting in 1909 when Louis Bleriot flew his little rag-and-stick
aircraft across the English channel from France to England.
Which brings me back to the point I was trying to make with my
story about flowers from Costa Rica. It's all connected; life is a
web, both frightening and wonderful in it's complexity. Yes, the
Costa Rica answer is smart-alecky (which is part of the reason I
like it), but if you're going to use it, you might also include
this: The airplane is just one thing that made it possible
for Central America to sell flowers in the United States. There were
also improvements in agriculture and botany, political developments
that reduced trade barriers and promoted a global economy, and new
methods of communications that allowed florists to manage the
world-wide distribution of flowers. It wasn't just the airplane.
Take a look at the
Timeline
I helped prepare for this section of the web site. The column titled
The Bigger Picture shows there were many other things going
on in the world while the Wright brothers worked to invent the
airplane and these things affected them. It was the same for those
events and advances that happened after the Wrights perfected a
practical flying machine. Take any one thing that you think has
changed because of the airplane and take a good look at how that
change came about. You will no doubt find that the change was caused
by a bunch of things and the airplane was just one of them.
How
did the Wright brothers
invent the airplane?
Well, first of all, the Wright brothers never
claimed to have invented the airplane. I know that on this web site
and in many history books they are continually referred to as the
“inventors of the airplane,” but even they themselves said that they
were not. If you would ask Orville and Wilbur this question, they
would probably answer that Sir George Cayley was the first person to
design a fixed-wing aircraft that would be moved through the air by
some form motive force – what we today call an airplane. In fact,
the Wright brothers didn’t even claim to be the first to have flown
in an airplane. In a speech he gave before the Western Society of
Engineers in 1901, Wilbur Wright said that honor goes to Sir Hiram
Maxim, who in 1894 made an unplanned flight of about 200 feet when
the steam-powered “captured biplane” he had built to test lifting
surfaces escaped the track that held it down. It wallowed about in a
the air with its frightened crew for a few seconds, flying two to
three feet above the ground.
The honor that the Wright brothers claimed for
themselves was that they were the first to make a sustained,
controlled, powered flight. Powered flight had been
attempted many times before and some people, like Hiram Maxim and
Clement Ader, managed to leave the ground for a few moments, but
their flights weren’t sustained. In 1896, Samuel Langely’s unmanned
“aerodromes” made sustained flights – they stayed aloft as long as
there was fuel to run the engines – but these flights were
uncontrolled.
The Wright brothers realized that airplanes
would be dangerous and useless if they could not be controlled. In
order for aviation to be a practical means of transportation, you
have to be able to make the aircraft go where you wanted it to go.
So that’s what they invented – a control system for airplanes. The
patent that they were granted in 1906, the grandfather patent of the
airplane, is all about the control system. It doesn’t even mention
or show an engine.
So how
did the Wright brothers
invent the airplane control
system?
“Invent” is a synonym for “solving a problem.”
Scientists and engineers such as the Wright brothers are first and
foremost problem solvers. And the first thing you do to solve
a complex problem is some research – you see what other people have
tried before you so you know what not to do. So the first thing that
the Wright brothers did was read everything they could get their
hands on about “mechanical flight.” They discovered that only birds
were successful at controlled flight. A few human beings such as
Otto Lilienthal and Octave Chanute had controlled their gliders by
shifting the body weight of the pilot, but this was hardly a
practical way of controlling and airplane. Can you imagine hanging
beneath a fighter or an airliner and trying to make it turn by
kicking left or right? So the Wrights studied birds in flight –
turkey vultures and pigeons, mostly.
What they found was that birds used
aerodynamic flight controls – they moved parts of their wings
and tail this way and that to deflect the airstream moving over
them. This caused the birds to veer up, down, left, and right. So
the next step in solving the problem was to come up with an
aerodynamic flight system for airplanes. In 1899, they performed an
experiment with a model glider flown as a kite to show they could
used a horizontal surface – an elevator – to go up and down and they
could twist or warp the wings to go right and left.
In 1900, they moved to the next part
of the problem – making a manned glider with aerodynamic controls.
This proved harder than they thought. After two years of trying,
they still hadn’t created a glider that would support their weight
in the air, let alone test their control system. So they took a
detour and studied different wing shapes in a wind tunnel to see
which would produce the most lift. The third glider that the built –
the 1902 Wright Glider – had all the lift they needed. But when they
began to test their controls, they found yet another problem. The
glider would sometimes spin out of control. After much
experimentation, they finally realized that they needed a vertical
control surface, a rudder. When the added a movable rudder, the
glider worked. The 1902 glider was the first machine ever with
three-axis control – an elevator to pitch the aircraft up and down,
wing-warping to roll it clockwise and counterclockwise, and a rudder
to yaw it right and left. This was their invention. The patent
drawings show their 1902 glider! The rest of the story – adding an
engine in 1903, developing a launch system and piloting skills in
1904, and refining the engine, the airplane, and the pilots in 1905
– this is what they did to make their invention practical.
What was the Wright
Flyer made of?
For the most part, it was made of wood, cloth,
and metal.
Let’s take the wood parts first. The straight
wooden airframe parts and the propellers were made from spruce. This
wood is very light but very strong, but it doesn’t bend well. So the
bent wooden parts were made from ash. This is a slightly heavier
wood than spruce and it’s just as strong, but it’s easy to bend.
There was also a little bit of boxwood in the Flyer. Boxwood is an
extremely heavy and dense wood that was used to make roller skates
in the early 1900s. The Wright bought boxwood roller skate wheels
and machined them to make the pulleys they needed for the Flyer
control system.
The metal was mostly soft steel, such as the
steel automobile bodies are made from. All the fittings, fasteners,
straps, gussets, and the tubing that held the propeller shafts are
made from this stuff. As you add carbon to steel, it gets harder
and stronger. The 15-gauge bicycle spoke wire that was used to ring
the Flyer was made from slightly harder (higher carbon content)
steel. So were the gears in the engine and on the ends of the
propeller shafts. When you add lots of carbon to steel, it gets hard
enough to make tools. Consequently, it’s called tool steel. The
crankshaft in the engine and the propeller shafts were made from
tool steel. The links and rollers in the engine timing chain and the
drive chains that turned the propellers were also tool steel, or
close to it. The engine block was made an aluminum alloy to keep the
Flyer as light as possible. Most engines in 1903 were made from cast
iron, which is very heavy. Aluminum is much lighter, but not as
strong. So the Wrights used an alloy that was 92% aluminum and 8%
copper – the copper made the aluminum harder and stronger. There was
of course some copper in the magneto and electrical wiring that
generated electrical sparks in the engine, and probably some brass
in the instruments – anemometer, stopwatch, and tachometer – the
Wrights carried on board. Finally, there was a tiny bit of platinum
in the engine. The “points” of the electrical breakers in the
combustion chambers were platinum. These points created sparks to
ignite the gasoline when the breakers opened. Had they been made of
steel or copper, the electrical sparks would have burned and
corroded the surfaces. The sparks would have grown weaker. Platinum
did not corrode and the sparks remained “hot.”
The cloth that covered the wings and control
surfaces was cotton muslin with over 200 threads per inch. The
particular muslin was very popular in the Wrights time for making
women’s undergarments because it was so finely woven and soft to the
touch. The Wrights need the fine weave to keep the wing covering as
airtight as possible. They probably sealed the muslin with “canvas
paint,” a solution of melted paraffin wax and gasoline. After you
paint the solution on the cloth, the gasoline evaporates leaving the
paraffin behind to seal any spaces between the cotton fibers. The
sailors and fishermen around Kitty Hawk used this to make their boat
sails airtight, and it would have been readily available to the
Wright brothers.
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