Inventing Flight: The Wright Brothers and Their Predecessors (review)

John Anderson is a veteran aerospace engineer who has brought his special expertise to the history of aeronautics. In this new book, derived from his History of Aerodynamics (1997), he examines the Wright brothers and their predecessors, stressing that—while the Wrights deserve full credit for the invention of the first practical airplane—they built on at least a century of experimentation in aerodynamics. Inventing Flight reinforces our understanding of technological change as a process rather than a loose sequence of "Eureka moments" or individual flashes of genius. We learn also that the so-called miracle of flight was the culmination of a sustained, iterative, dynamic phenomenon combining science, engineering, theory, and empiricism. In this evolution, Anderson emphasizes, the Wrights "stood on the shoulders of giants, and we must become acquainted with those giants" (p. vii).

Standing tall in that pantheon is Sir George Cayley, who in the early part of the nineteenth century established the definitive configuration of the airplane, with fixed wings, fuselage, and vertical and horizontal tail-control surfaces. Others contributing to the process were William Samuel Henson and John Stringfellow, whose speculative "Aerial Steam Carriage" exhibited all the necessary characteristics of the airplane. Alphonse Penaud, before taking his own life at the age of thirty, flew a rubber band–powered model in 1871. The first wind tunnel came from the work of Francis Herbert Wenham, who also verified the superiority of high-aspect-ratio (long and narrow) wings, and Horatio F. Phillips, who provided definitive proof that cambered surfaces, or airfoils, generated more lift than flat plates. All worked in what we now know as "applied aerodynamics"; contemporary scientists and theoreticians displayed little or no curiosity about the practical side of their studies of fluid dynamics.

Of particular interest to scholars is Anderson's mildly revisionist interpretations of the work of Otto Lilienthal and Samuel P. Langley. In some respects awed by the lofty and fully deserved pedestal on which the Wrights stand, historians have tended to overlook the efforts of these two men. Although the Wrights concluded that Lilienthal's tables of coefficients were inaccurate, Anderson shows that they are correct if applied only to stationary airfoils of elliptical planform and a given aspect ratio in natural air currents. As for Langley, his much-derided "power law," which posited that the energy needed to push a flying machine through the air decreases at higher velocities, is actually correct for very slow speeds. Langley was also the first to prove experimentally that high-aspect-ratio wings generate more lift than low-aspect-ratio ones.

Anderson is judicious in his treatment of the Wrights, whose major contributions to aerodynamics were their treatment of the airplane as a complex system and their introduction of a method of lateral control (wing warping). On the other hand, the brothers were slow to understand the importance of the relationship between lift and high-aspect-ratio wings. Moreover, while their wind-tunnel tests resulted in the "the most valuable technical data in the history of applied aerodynamics" (p. 125) up to that time, their experiments had little effect on later developments because, as with Langley's data, they were pertinent only to low aircraft speeds.

Some readers will be bothered by Anderson's tendency toward ahistorical speculation. He states that, had the Wrights not come along, someone else (probably French) would have invented the airplane; and that had Langley conducted his experiments at higher speeds, he would never have postulated his power law. We simply do not know that these people would have done what Anderson says they could have or might have done, no matter what the changed circumstances. And there are also some contradictions. Anderson states, for example, that Langley's full-scale flying machine possibly would have been capable of sustained flight had it been successfully launched, but later concludes that Langley's machine "failed as a system" (p. 145). Furthermore, Anderson's internalist approach sometimes...