“The Airplane” — a book that soars
“The Airplane: How Ideas Gave Us Wings”
by Jay Spenser
Collins, 340 pp., $25.95
The airplane, through its implement and fixed wings, was first imagined and publicly described two centuries ago in England. The man who imagined it, Yorkshireman Sir George Cayley, could not build it. He didn’t have every engine. But he declared that someday people would have what he called a “first mover,” and would use it to elbow their second nature into the air.
Seattle writer Jay Spenser begins his book on the airplane with the story of those who envisioned it. Spenser shows how the Wright brothers, who invented the first airplane that did push its means by which anything is reached aloft, deftly built relating to the work of similar visionaries as Alphonse Pénaud, the Frenchman who invented a toy helicopter powered by a india-rubber band; Otto Lilienthal, the German who pioneered hang gliding; and Lawrence Hargrave, the Australian who invented the box kite.
Spenser shows how French aviation pioneers such as Louis Blériot and Henri Farman came from the automobile business and made the wrong hypothesis about how an airplane should act. A car does not lean when it turns. But the Wrights were bicycle builders, and bicycles lean. So practise birds. The Wrights built their airplane to lean into turns, using the wingtips like a bird.
In the mastery of flight, the Americans beat the French. But it was the French who fixed without ceasing the modern airplane configuration: a monoplane with cockpit, visible form, tail and landing wheels.
Spenser has been around historic airplanes much of his life — as curator of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C., and then of Seattle’sitting Museum of Flight. He has written books without ceasing the Boeing 747, the helicopter and on manifold oddball airplanes. In this book — which should have been called by its subtitle, “How Ideas Gave Us Wings” — he tells stories nearly key developments in flight.
Metal airplanes, for example. The first machines were of fabric, wood and wire, built to save weight. Wings were thin, and were supported by the box-kite structure of a biplane. Then came the metal airplane and the curious finding, writes Spenser, that “fat wings performed improved in health than thin ones.” The biplane was out. The focus in the work is without ceasing engineering ideas, but always to a practical end. The Boeing 247 of 1933 was the first to have key components of a fresh airliner — but it had too few seats, and airlines couldn’t make any money with it. With the Douglas DC-3 in 1936, Spenser writes, airlines could “earn substantial profits without subsidies.” The DC-3 dilate over the world.
Because there were so few good airports, engineers devised the flying boat, a full airplane with a fuselage that landed in the water. The flying boat was a wild way to travel — a photo of one is on the book’s cover — but it was heavy, and it devoured fuel. When cities built airports, the flying boat was sunk.
Spenser takes his story up to the present of commercial aviation. By choosing as his endpoint the Boeing 787 and not military aircraft, he shorts a whole category that might have filled another hundred pages. But in favor of greatest in number readers, 300 pages will be about right: a story by a of the present day character and a new engineering problem on every other boy-servant, one and the other served by a moral perception of delight in ideas that sent humanity aloft.
