The Little Immigrant Who Didn't: Glenn Curtiss' Failed Attempt to Fight the Wright's Flight

A little over a week ago the Connecticut State Legislature passed a bill recognizing one of their residents, Gustave Whitehead, as being the first to invent and fly a heavier-than-air aircraft.  First as in "before the Wright Brothers."

Complete and utter nonsense.  Absolutely not possible.  And here's why:

The Wrights were not the only ones interested in heavier-than-air aircraft (balloons using hot air or light gas such as hydrogen had existed for over a century.  These flew using the principal that their total volume weighed less than an identical volume composed of atmospheric air and thus were termed "lighter-than-air aircraft").  Hundreds of scientists, engineers, and tinkerers had been working on the problem for decades.  The ones that were really serious recognized that flight is all about generating lift and used formal engineering analysis on their designs to maximize lift while minimizing drag.  Unfortunately, almost everyone built upon the work of John Smeaton, a brilliant and well-respected 18th century engineer who, among other things, developed an equation for calculating lift.  The problem was that Smeaton's equation included a constant coefficient which happened to be wrong.  Not just a little bit wrong at the sixth decimal place but off by a whopping 33%.  It was this mistake which doomed design after design to failure- including many of the Wright Brothers early gliders.  They were the first ones to suspect something was wrong with the equation and so they were the first ones to build a wind tunnel to experimentally test the equation and discover the correct coefficient value.  So, there at the dawn of flight, the Wrights were the only ones using the right equation to design an airfoil.

The wind tunnel and their methodical and empirical scientific discovery of the correct equation for lift wasn't the only innovation necessary to build an airplane.  Arguably more critical than wing design is propulsion design.  In order to generate lift a wing also generates drag and the engine of the airplane must be powerful enough to completely overcome that drag.  Remember that this was at the dawn of not only aviation but automobiles and internal combustion engines as well.  Engines had recently been developed which could provide the necessary horsepower to allow an airplane to fly- but they were made out of cast iron, steel, and bronze and weighed hundreds of pounds.  Good enough for automobiles, they were just too heavy to get off the ground.  So the Wrights gave the task of creating a suitable engine to one of the employees in their bike shop, Charles Edward Taylor.  Mentored by the Wrights, Taylor also applied scientific and engineering analysis to the problem and realized that a relatively new metal had the strength-to-weight properties necessary: Aluminum.  While aluminum had been known as a metal for over a century the lack of a suitable refining process made it as valuable as gold for most of its history.  It had come on the market as a cost-effective building material only ten years before the Wright Brother's first flight.  So, when Taylor provided the Wright with that first engine which produced 12HP but weighed only 150 pounds, the brothers possessed the only engine in the world with a power-to-weight ratio sufficient to enable an airplane to fly.

Having the right engine is only half of the propulsion problem, though- the engine still needs to apply its power to flight.  The Wrights chose to use two counter-rotating propellers hand-carved from wood.  Initially they thought to adapt tried-and-true marine propellers (screws) to the task but swiftly realized that wouldn't work because of the vastly different densities of the working mediums (water vs. air).  A few weeks of research uncovered that no one had theretofore developed a good propeller for use in air.  They would (again) be breaking new ground.  After considering the problem the brothers realized that the correct approach was to think of the propeller as a set of rotating wings.  They had already tested over forty different airfoil designs in their wind tunnel so they selected one which would maximize efficiency as a propeller.  And it worked- when they were done their props developed an astonishing 70% efficiency (70% of the engine's output went to propel the aircraft).  That was over double the efficiency of the propellers used by all the other airplane inventors of the time.  Even today, with computational fluid dynamics, CAD, and wind tunnel testing wooden propellers have only reached 85% efficiency.

So, to summarize, the Wrights were the only people in the world who possessed an equation of lift with the correct coefficient, the only ones who had used this equation in a wind tunnel to develop adequate airfoil designs, the only ones who possessed an engine with a sufficient power-to-weight ratio, and the only ones with an efficient propeller for the engine to drive.  Without all of these key ingredients it would be impossible for anyone to build an airplane capable of flight.

So what about Whitehead?  He had a wood-and-fabric aircraft (that decades later he claimed was really aluminum and fabric) that to the untrained eye looked kind of like the Wright Flyer.  He claimed to have flown it.  Eyewitnesses claimed to have seen him fly.  Why would anyone lie?  The answer is simple:  They were paid.  The problem with the Wright's numerous inventions related to flight was that they patented them, and expected to be paid licensing fees by aircraft manufacturers.  One of these early aviation pioneers was Glenn Curtiss who absolutely hated having to pay royalties to the Wrights- so he didn't, forcing the Wrights to sue for patent infringement.  Curtiss then began a long legal campaign to break the Wright's patents, and the main tactic for breaking any patent is to present what is known as "prior art."  In other words, prove that someone else invented the item prior to the patent holder.  This was big business, and Curtiss' company had plenty of bribe money- some of which found its way into the pocket of one Albert Zahm, consultant at the Smithsonian Aerodynamical Laboratory and later Chief Engineer at Curtiss.  During one of the patent lawsuit trials Orville Wright managed to thoroughly (and publicly) discredit Zahm, which Zahm never forgave.  He spent the next forty years writing articles trying to discredit the Wrights, and even offered a bounty paid out of his own pocket for any proof that Whitehead flew.  Other than a single eyewitness account, none was ever tendered.  Indeed, Curtiss himself gave up on the Whitehead story as ridiculous and pursued other avenues.

Whitehead was certainly a visionary- he recognized aviation as a very important future industry.  And he certainly put a lot of time, effort, and money into inventing an airplane.  Unfortunately he lacked the scientific rigor and genius possessed by two young men in Dayton, Ohio, and all of the necessary elements of flight which they alone possessed.  Whitehead never got off the ground in any of the many airplanes which he built, and thus joined the ranks of the many hundreds of scientists, engineers, and garage tinkerers who didn't invent the airplane.

For a somewhat different take on the Whitehead story, take a look at: Who Was First?