Communications

To The Editor:

When I received the April 2004 issue of Technology and Culture I followed my habit of skimming through the table of contents immediately. My interest was piqued by the title of Robert Casey's note, "An Unprepossessing Aircraft." The Dayton-Wright RB-1 might not attract the interest of a twenty-first-century audience used to flying in Boeing 747s, but that sleek, diminutive airplane was an eye-catcher when first exhibited in 1920, and much was expected of it by the aeronautical community. A minor mechanical failure—a broken left rudder cable—forced it to withdraw from the 1920 Gordon Bennett Trophy Race after a few minutes of flying. Apparently it never was repaired and flown again. Accounts of its performance then do not support Casey's theory that the machine was unstable; the broken rudder cable caused the RB-1 to become uncontrollable, as might be expected. One might speculate that the reason it never was repaired is that the Dayton-Wright Company, a subsidiary of General Motors, was closed down shortly after the race. Perhaps GM decided that Cadillacs would earn a better return than airplanes; the failure rate of aircraft manufacturers in the 1920s would support the business wisdom of such a decision.

I was inspired by Casey's note to telephone him, but I'd like to comment here as well on a few of his points. First, the limited forward visibility he mentions was at that time overcome by the pilot opening the sliding windows in the narrow fuselage and sticking his head out. This unsatisfactory solution could have been improved upon by two modifications that in 1927 were included in Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis: an overhead window and a retractable periscope. If the RB-1 was indeed unstable that problem might have been dealt with by minor design changes, which would have been suggested in now-lost pilot and engineering notes. (When I spoke with Casey he told me that no archival material concerning the RB-1 is held by the Henry Ford Museum.) Finally, Casey mentions Charles Hampson Grant. Grant and I exchanged letters in the early 1980s, after he had published his second treatise on model aeronautics, though we did not correspond explicitly about the Dayton-Wright RB-1. Casey notes that Grant had been an early builder of model airplanes, and indeed, the evidence I have indicates that Grant had taken up that hobby by 1910, when he was 16 years old. But Casey speculates that Grant may have brought a knowledge of balsa wood gained in model building to his work on the RB-1 and suggested its use in the aircraft's wing. That cannot be so, as balsa wood was not used in the construction of model airplanes until the late 1920s and did not become the major material used in constructing flying model airplanes until a couple of years later. Perhaps the opposite is the case, then: that balsa wood was introduced into model construction because Grant became aware of it while working on the RB-1 project.

Mark Levinson

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To The Editor:

My review of Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, eds., From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art and Literature (January 2004) inadvertently suggested that "ether" as defined by physicists and the "ether" of chemists were the same. While there may have been tenuous efforts to create parallels if not alignments between them in the later nineteenth century, the point I was trying to make was one about the accessibility of definitions in public discourse. They are not the same, and I apologize for the confusion of my careless phrasing.

Sarah Lowengard

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To The Editor:

Several readers have kindly pointed out that my essay in the April issue, "A Narrative for Our Time," makes an incorrect reference to Soldier Field as the site of the Manhattan Project. "Soldier Field is where the Chicago Bears play football," writes a friend. "The site of the Manhattan Project was Amos Alonzo Stagg Field at the University of...