Airplane

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"A mechanically driven fixed-wing aircraft, heavier than air, which is supported by the dynamic reaction of the air against its wings."

In its initial definition within Class 244 of the patent classification system, the United States Patent Office defined an airplane as a structure adapted to fly freely above the earth, sustained by the reaction of the air on one or more planes.[1]

Schematic of early airplane types appearing in Graffigny, 1909, Les Aéroplans, p. 20.

According to Albert Francis Zahm (Zahm, 1944, p. 326), William Samuel Henson invented the airplane, and patented it with Patent GB-1842-9478.

Chronology of proto-aviation: Graffigny, 1909, Les Aéroplans, pp. 14–17.

The airplane archetype

Freudenthal, 1940, The Aviation Business, pp. 13–14:

Curtiss considered this transatlantic flight immediately practicable, and his words reveal his opinion that the models of 1912 were not basically different from the earliest models:

There is no doubt that such a flight [across the Atlantic] is possible today, just as the flight across the United States was possible in even the early stages of aviation. For the machine and the motor which actually accomplished this trip were almost the same as the very first models; . . . (Italics mine).9

Other authorities, writing later, agree on this similarity of the essentials of the airplane since the first models: the Boeing Clipper of 1938, for example, had a Wright Cyclone engine of 1,500 horsepower compared with the 24-horsepower motor used by Santos-Dumont in 1906, but the essential fact of the internal-combustion engine remains the same.10 General William Mitchell, who had studied with Curtiss early in his career, confirmed the quotation just cited eighteen years after Curtiss had written it:

The first successful airplane of the Wrights contained all the principal parts that a modern plane has. Their landing gear and method of controlling the various surfaces, although somewhat different in mechanical arrangement from those now in use, were essentially the same . . . it is a question whether the airplane of today is any safer than were some of those constructed by the Wrights.11

Evolution of terminology

Francis Herbert Wenham is credited with introducing the term aeroplane in the 1860s.

There was some delay between the invention of working airplanes and the crystallization of the term airplane and its counterparts in other languages. In Germany they were called Drachenflieger for a time before the modern term Flugzeug became prevalent.

The factor of counterparts in other languages gets us back into the our handling of airplane as referring to the entire aircraft, with aeroplane as referring to the lift surfaces. There is some historical basis for this, but there is the fact of variability in usage, in the antique source material. Countless British, and American, patent original documents, patents as well as publication titles and so forth, use aeroplane with reference to the entire aircraft. In the nature of this variability in the usage of "aeroplane"(en), much explication of linguistic developments including Russian and Hungarian, pertaining to the entire aircraft, is currently situated on page aeroplane.

In England there are some patents describing machines of the airplane type, which simply call them flying machines. The eminent Frederick William Lanchester, does not seem to have adopted airplane until 1916.

Pessimism regarding

See: People who said controlled heavier-than-air flight was impossible

Recalled by Mark Sullivan (b. 1875):

To dismiss aviation with the damnation of jeers was orthodox. Puck, a periodical genially confident of the ultimateness of things as they are, printed on October 19, 1904:

"When," inquired his friend, more for the sake of asking than for the answer, "will you wing — I believe that is the correct term — your first flight?"
"Just as soon," replied the flying machine inventor, "as I can get the" — And, yet, it has been said that lunatics have no sense of humor — "laws of gravitation repealed."

Newspapers occasionally published articles or fiction stories that dealt with the coming day of the flying-machine in the spirit of a kind of semi-precious pseudo-science; of the Jules Verne sort — perpetual motion, rain-making, pits dug through to China, messages from Mars, and visitors from outer space. Aviation was regarded as kin to these, a legitimate field for increasing fantasy.[2]

This wiki has 3,347 patents in category "Airplane". Other techtypes related to Airplane: AU 90.3, Austro-Daimler engine, Aviation, CA 244/11, CA 244/12, CA 244/5, CA 244/6, CA 244/7, CA 244/8, CA 244/9, CA 272/25, Compression, CPC B64, CPC B64C, CPC B64C23/005, CPC B64C27/26, CPC B64D27/023, Drachenflieger, FR 6.4, GB 4 aëroplanes, HU V/h, IPC B64C, NZ 90.3, Rarefaction, RU 62b, RU Group V, USPC 244, USPC 244/13, USPC 244/154, USPC 244/4, USPC 244/6, USPC 244/7, USPC 244/8, USPC 244/9

Patents in category Airplane

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Publications referring to Airplane

Letters referring to Airplane

See also

References

  1. ↑ Classification Bulletin of the United States Patent Office for July 1, 1909, to December 31, 1909; p. 4.
  2. ↑ Sullivan, 1927, Our Times, 556.
Enclosing categories Simple tech terms
Subcategories
Keywords Propulsion, Langley's Law, Airfoil
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