Airplane: Previous Transportation and Shipping Technologies

The greatest improvements in transportation have appeared in the last two centuries, a period during which the Industrial Revolution has vastly changed the economic life of the entire world. Two of these innovations with the greatest impact include steamships and railroads.

Steamships

James Watt's steam engine, perfected in the 1760s, did much more than provide power for many factories in England. By the end of the 18th century, French, Scottish, and American inventors were trying to apply the steam engine to navigation. In 1775 a Frenchman, Jacques Périer, built an early steamboat, and in 1807, Robert Fulton launched the steamboat Clermont on the Hudson River. In 1819 the steamer Savannah crossed the Atlantic, and by the middle of the 19th century steam navigation was replacing the sailing vessel, with many of the new ships built of iron rather than wood.

This new form of water transportation was particularly important in the broad Mississippi River valley of the United States. Hundreds of flat-hulled, tall-stacked western steamboats served the triangular territory reaching from Pittsburgh and Montana down to New Orleans. Until the 1850s the expansion of the western frontier was closely tied to the side-wheelers and stern-wheelers (types of steam ships) serving the 25,700 km (16,000 mi) of navigable streams in the inland Mississippi River basin. The steamboat finally gave way to the railroad during the time of the Civil War.

Railroads

Although it first appeared in England, the railroad had its most dramatic growth in the United States. By 1840 more than 4,800 km (3,000 mi) of railroad were already operating in the eastern states, a figure 40% greater than the total railroad mileage of Europe. By the eve of the Civil War the iron network in the United States was more than 48,000 km (30,000 mi) long, and the railroads of the western lines had nearly caught up with the ever-moving western frontier. By 1860 the railroad had clearly shown its superiority over turnpikes, canals, and steamboats.

Following the Civil War several railroad lines were extended all the way to the Pacific coast the first being the Union Pacific–Central Pacific, completed in 1869. Railroad construction in general was very rapid in the postwar decades; by 1890 the length of the U.S. rail system was 262,000 km (163,000 mi), and by 1916 it had reached an all-time high of 409,000 km (254,000 mi). Since World War I, however, the U.S. railroads have been in a decline, due partly to the rapid development of private automobiles, trucks, buses, pipelines, and airlines.


Airplane: Earlier Technology

Humans Try to Fly like Birds

For many centuries, humans have tried to fly and have studied the flight of birds. Wings made of feathers or light-weight wood have been attached to arms to test their ability to fly. The results were often disastrous as the muscles of the human arms are not like those of birds.

1799-1850's - George Cayley – Gliders


Sir George Cayley is considered the father of aerodynamics, and worked to discover a way that man could fly. Cayley experimented with wing design, distinguished between lift and drag, and formulated the concepts of vertical tail surfaces, steering rudders, rear elevators, and air screws. Cayley designed many different versions of gliders that used the movements of the body to control them. A young boy, whose name is not known, was the first to fly one of Cayley's gliders, the first capable of carrying a human.

For over 50 years, George Cayley made improvements to his gliders. Cayley changed the shape of the wings so that the air would flow over them correctly, and designed a tail to help with stability. He tried a biplane design to add strength. He also recognized that there would be a need for machine power if the flight was to be in the air for a long time. George Cayley wrote "On Ariel Navigation" that showed that a fixed wing aircraft with a power system for propulsion, and a tail to assist in the control of the airplane, would be the best way to allow man to fly.

When Orville and Wilbur Wright flew history's first airplane for 120 short feet (36-1/2 meters) in North Carolina in 1903, the significance of their new invention was of course not yet apparent. The first passenger planes, barely 20 years later, did little to change that view. Several airmail services flying for the Post Office added a few seats for extra revenue, but their planes were noisy, cold, and uncomfortable. They couldn't fly over mountains, so passengers took trains for part of their journey. Nor could these planes, such as the Ford Trimotor, carry enough seats to make passenger traffic profitable. The train was still the way to go.

But Americans watched airplanes help the Nation and its allies France and Britain win World War I. After the war, daredevil pilots appeared across America. They were called "barnstormers" because their stunts included flying small planes through open barns. According to journalist Thomas Petzinger, schools would close and workers would leave businesses, to watch these people perform. Americans were awed to see that humans could fly in machines and dive and bank like a swift falcon or eagle.

In 1927, Lindbergh's transatlantic flight captured America's imagination. Lindbergh, himself a barnstormer, flew a small airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, for 33 hours from New York to Paris. When his safe arrival in Paris was announced, league ballgames stopped, and radio announcers sobbed. Humans, who had always looked to the sky and stars with wonder, could now cross vast oceans with amazing speed by taking to the sky.

By the late 1930s, the airlines carried mail and passengers from coast to coast. The DC-3, a new airplane with powerful engines and an enclosed cabin, cut the cost of flying in half. It made airlines a profitable business. But at a cost of 5 cents per mile to transport one passenger, air travel was still expensive. Train travel cost only 1.3 cents per passenger mile and was still more comfortable. The average person usually couldn't afford to fly. But, according to aerospace writer T.A. Heppenheimer, a whole class of people, businessmen who put a money value on their time, could afford to fly on company expense accounts. They did, in soaring numbers.

Further developments during World War II sped the development of commercial aviation. Military airfields built for the war effort were afterwards sold to cities, which were eager to open their own commercial airports. Airplane manufacturers Douglas and Boeing built new airplanes with pressurized and heated cabins. Suddenly airplanes could fly above bad weather and mountains, where the air and thus the ride were smoother. In 1940, three million Americans flew. By 1956, 55 million flew.

In a country with a population of barely 150 million, large numbers of Americans were seeing the world from the air. Businessmen could meet with customers and partners and return home, in a fraction of the time required by ground travel. In a century where technological changes of all kinds were changing common expectations about life, medicines began to cure diseases, cars were beginning to make personal travel faster, electricity and plumbing simplified daily tasks and made daily life far more pleasant, the ability to fly was part of a growing sense of mastery over the world and control of one's destiny.


Airplane: Development and Impact

Orville and his brother Wilbur operated a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. They had been dreaming about flying since the 1890s. They were not trained scientists or engineers, but they made a scientific study of the problems of flight and spent a great deal of time observing birds. They noticed that birds soared into the wind and that the air flowing over the curved surface of their wings created lift. Birds change the shape of their wings to turn and maneuver. The brothers believed that they could use this technique of warping (changing the shape) of a portion of an aircraft wing.

The brothers built and tested gliders to understand the principles of flying. They created a wind tunnel in the bicycle shop to test wing designs, and they studied propeller designs and control mechanisms. Their machinist built a 12-horsepower gasoline engine for them. By 1903, the brothers had built a twin-winged airplane, the Flyer, and they felt confident it would fly.

At Kitty Hawk, they constructed a wooden track down a hill to provide a smooth surface for takeoff. With Orville at the controls, Wilbur guided the plane down the track, and it bounded into the air. After covering 40 yards (37 meters) in 12 seconds, it landed gently in the sand. Before the day was out, the brothers had made three more flights, one of which lasted almost a minute. Man, at last, had learned to fly.

During 1904 and 1905 they made further experiments at a field near Dayton, with Wilbur achieving a flight of 24 miles (39 km) in 1905. They closed a contract with the U.S. War Department for the first army plane in 1908, for which tests were completed in 1909. Meanwhile, in 1908, the Compagnie Générale de Navigation Aérienne was formed to manufacture, sell, and license Wright airplanes in France, where Wilbur gave demonstrations and trained pilots. In 1909 Orville flew in Germany and Wilbur made sensational flights in New York City. By the end of 1909 the Wright Company had been organized in the United States. The Wright brothers soon thereafter became embroiled in a bitter patent suit with the American aviator and aircraft designer Glenn Curtiss that was not resolved until 1917. Two years earlier, however, Orville, the surviving brother, had sold the Wright Company to a group of New York financiers.

The development of the airplane and other heavier-than-air craft has had the most far-reaching effects of any 20th-century invention. Although many scientific disciplines are involved in the rapid advances in aviation technology, none is as important as the aircraft itself.

The first powered, controllable aircraft, Orville and Wilbur Wright's flying machine, demonstrated in its structure the same basic principles of flight as do today's high-flying jets. The wings, or airfoils, of the original 1903 Wright Flyer resembled a box kite.

The Wright Flyer was an extremely difficult aircraft to fly because it was statically unstable: it could not "fly by itself" but had to be constantly controlled by the pilot. European inventors believed that an aircraft should be inherently stable, and they soon improved upon the Wright brothers' design by developing dynamically stable and controllable aircraft that were safer and easier to fly. The concept of static stability has carried over to virtually all aircraft designs—although recent developments in fighter aircraft, such as the General Dynamics F-16, show that aerodynamically unstable aircraft have some advantages in maneuverability.

The success of any one of the thousands of different craft made since the Wright brothers' first flying machine depended on the quality of research, design, engineering, and manufacturing used to produce it. By the time World War II began (35 years after the first flight), the aviation industry had accumulated enough experience in aerodynamics, materials, and structures to ensure uniformity in aircraft development. As a result, most modern aircraft exhibit many structural similarities. They are almost always monoplanes—single- rather than double-winged. They are made of metal, are powered by one to four jet or reciprocating engines, and are supported on the ground by retractable landing gear.