"The Connecticut Assembly's decision is based on my research, which was peer-reviewed and confirmed earlier this year. I’ve posted it here: www.gustave-whitehead.com. (Readers interested in the new findings will find more of “a different take” there than at the Wright website to which you refer them.)
Being a "geek" usually involves "complete and utter" attention to the facts. Have you examined them?
You write, “to the untrained eye” the Whitehead plane “looked kind of like the Wright Flyer”. Actually, Whitehead’s wing was an exact replica of the one Otto Lilienthal used to provably make almost 2,500 controlled glides up to 1896. So it’s pretty clear, Whitehead had an airworthy wing – and that his monoplane didn’t look anything like the Wrights’ biplane.
(Fact-Check: You cite CFD-analysis. Did you know, every mathematical, CFD, and wind-tunnel analysis of the 1903 Wright Flyer shows it was unairworthy? No true model or replica of it has ever flown successfully – not to be confused with the later versions. That might interest a scientist.)
Whitehead was trained as an engine-builder at M.A.N.. In 1901, he was already selling lightweight engines to airship-builders. The acetylene engine he used to fly in 1901 was written up twice in the French peer journal, “L,Acétylène”. It had a much better power-to-weight ratio than the Wrights’ engine. This was confirmed by Wilbur Wright himself in a July 4, 1901 letter to Octave Chanute. It was also confirmed by the man who later became President Wilson’s Advisor for Aeronautics, Charles Wittemann. In 1908, Wittemann personally examined Whitehead’s 1901 engine and swore, under oath, that it was airworthy. So his engine was the best of its time too.
(Fact-Check: J. Carpenter writes, the Wright engine was simply a Pope-Toledo automobile engine which had been given an aluminum block. Charles Taylor’s only prior engine experience had been to repair one car – not much more could have been expected of him.)
You assert, there was only one witness of Whitehead flying. Actually, there were 17 (14 of them, under oath).
(Fact-Check: of the witnesses to the 1st 1903 powered flight of the Wrights, only two made written statements. Daniels said the plane took off from the slope of a sand dune and flew toward the beach below head height. The other witness wrote, he saw what Daniels saw, i.e. he made no statement of his own. That’s what that famous photo shows. A hillside launch into a 27mph headwind gliding down to MSL in ground effect – I’m not making this up.). Neither witness testified under oath.
So, there you have it! Once again, facts are getting in the way of another religious-type legend!"So, who is this guy John Brown? It's tough to say. Try Googling his name and you'll get a ton of information about a 19th century abolitionist. Probably not the same person.
Here's what he has to say about himself. But other than his self-published website I can't seem to find any books or articles written by him. Perhaps he will respond with a bibliography.
In the meantime I'm going to make the charitable assumption that John Brown is a legitimate (although perhaps amateur) aviation historian, that his motives are pure and that he truly believes what he is saying. And yet he and I hold contradictory positions- how to resolve this? He challenged me to "complete and utter attention to the facts." So lets do that.
First, I greatly encourage everyone interested to visit Mr. Brown's website at www.gustave-whitehead.com. I will be referring to it frequently. On July 4, 2013 I archived a copy of it to my local (and backed up) hard drive so there is no possibility of content quietly being changed.
In my previous article on the matter I laid out my case. Above is John Brown's rebuttal. I see no need to repeat anything, so instead I will go through each and every point he asserts in his rebuttal. There is way too much material for one blog post, so I'll split this up into several, spread out over many days.
"The Connecticut Assembly's decision is based on my research, which was peer-reviewed and confirmed earlier this year."Peer reviewed by whom? As part of what publication? What was actually confirmed, and how? Considering how incredibly contradictory Mr. Brown's own research material appears (more on that later) I don't see how anyone could do anything more than look at his newspaper clippings and say "yes, these appear to be true reproductions of the source." Really hoping to get a response on this one. Until then, I leave it at "OK, maybe you did, please tell us about it."
It's a good thing we're not talking about Global Warming because the consensus of historians is that Whitehead was a fraud. Indeed, it seems there's only four people championing Gustave Whitehead's 1901 flight: Stella Randolph, working in the 1930s, John Crane in the late 1940s,
William O'Dwyer in the 1960s, and now John Brown in 2013.
"You write, “to the untrained eye” the Whitehead plane “looked kind of like the Wright Flyer”. Actually, Whitehead’s wing was an exact replica of the one Otto Lilienthal used to provably make almost 2,500 controlled glides up to 1896. So it’s pretty clear, Whitehead had an airworthy wing – and that his monoplane didn’t look anything like the Wrights’ biplane."
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Here's a question: How many gliders did the Wrights make after their flight at Kitty Hawk? None. Why would anyone bother with a glider when they know how to make an airplane? But Whitehead did- he was experimenting with gliders all the way to 1906.
Lilienthal himself claimed only 2,000 flights, for a total of 5 hours accumulated flight time. That averages out to 9 seconds per flight. All of Lilienthal's flights were a controlled descent from a hill or structure- in none did he gain any appreciable height. He did not have a wing suitable for using thermals to gain altitude for an extended flight- a fact he confirmed on the glider flight that killed him when his craft encountered a thermal updraft and he lost control. It's certainly not Lilienthal's fault that his wing was unsuitable for a powered airplane; like everyone else he was working from an incorrect equation of lift with a Smeaton coefficient that was wrong (as I laid out in my original post).
Fact-Check: You cite CFD-analysis. Did you know, every mathematical, CFD, and wind-tunnel analysis of the 1903 Wright Flyer shows it was unairworthy?
Turns out the engineering school at the University of Buffalo did a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis of the Wright Flyer. Their conclusion: "The cambered wing provided the pressure distribution inducing the necessary lift needed for flight. In addition the biplane concept added extra lifting surface area. Such features being applied in that time is simply exceptional and made the flyer an absolute success." See for yourself here.
Indeed, I was unable to find any CFD analysis which called their design "un-airworthy."
The Wrights themselves, being the inventors of the wind tunnel, analyzed their design... and found it airworthy enough to trust their lives to it. But what about more recent wind tunnel tests? NASA Ames Research Center found the Wright Flyer to be unstable in more than one axis... but that the controls and flight surfaces were sufficient to overcome this instability. Their full write-up document can be found here.
This may be why the FAA certified the 1903 Flyer as airworthy and issued a certificate for it. So again, I was completely unable to find anyone (besides John Brown) who called the design "un-airworthy."
"No true model or replica of it has ever flown successfully – not to be confused with the later versions. That might interest a scientist."No true replica of Whitehead's No. 21 has ever flown either. Would that interest an aviation historian?
The problem is that there just aren't any surviving detailed blueprints of either plane. In the case of the Wright Flyer, after the fourth flight a gust of wind caught the aircraft, flipped it over, and completely wrecked it. The pieces got shoved into crates, shipped back to Dayton, and sadly got cannibalized for future airplanes. Flash forward to 1928- Wilbur's been dead for 16 years and Orville gets asked to rebuild the Flyer as a museum piece. Working largely from memory, and alone, the single Wright Brother did the best he could to get something that looked like the Flyer, but certainly was not particularly accurate. Air and Space magazine had an article that goes into much better detail on the challenges faced by modern recreators.
"Whitehead was trained as an engine-builder at M.A.N."No, he wasn't. Maschinenfabrik Augsburg Nürnberg AG, or M.A.N. didn't exist until 1908 when the company Vereinigte Maschinenfabrik Augsburg und Maschinenbaugesellschaft Nürnberg A.G., Augsburg renamed itself. If Whitehead had had an apprenticeship anywhere in Ausburg in the late 1880's it would have been at Maschinenfabrik Augsburg AG, the company that merged with Maschinenbau-AG Nürnberg in 1898 and eventually became M.A.N. in 1908.
By now all this German is giving everyone a headache and this is getting hard to follow. Fine, let's switch to a more familiar American example: In 1967, the McDonnell Aircraft Company (maker of many aircraft including the F-101 Voodoo) merged with the Douglas Aircraft Corporation (maker of the DC line of aircraft, such as the DC-3, DC-8, etc.) and formed the company "McDonnell Douglas." In 1997 McDonnell Douglas then merged with Boeing. So, imagine a person who briefly interned at McDonnell in the 1960s claiming to have been "trained by Boeing." It's just not true. All that can be truthfully stated is that Whitehead claims to have been trained at a company that merged with a company that eventually became M.A.N.
But even that claim doesn't pass the smell test. Brown tries to offer proof of Whitehead's training in a clipping from a German publication from 1952:
"In seiner Lehrzeit als Schlosser widmete er sich nebenher eifrig dem Studium der technischen Wissenschaften, Dank seiner ungewöhnlichen Begabung hatte er es leicht, sich in der Grossfirma M.A.N. im Dieselmotorenbau auszubilden."
This Brown translates as:
"During his apprenticeship as a machinist, he diligently studied the technical sciences on the side. Due to his unusual degree of talent, it was easy for him to learn how to build diesel engines at M.A.N. corporation."
Okay everyone, don't take my word for it. Quick, run to Google Translate and see for yourself that "Schlosser" is German for "locksmith." Try a few other translators while you're at it. Find someone who speaks German. Then, use all these same resources to find out what is the German word for "machinist." Yep, it's "maschinist." Not really that surprising when one considers that the German word for machine is "maschine."
So, Brown is presenting us with a document, written 65 years after the fact, which claims that Whitehead did quite well in his year of locksmith school, and that he studied "technical sciences on the side."
Another problem with all this is that Gustave Whitehead didn't move to Ausburg until his parents died in 1886 and 1887 and he and his brother moved in with their grandma. Brown presents an article in which Whitehead himself states "Since I was a boy, going to high school in Augsburg, Germany, where I acquired some knowledge of mechanics and engineering, I have had the idea of a flying machine in my mind."
High school and an apprenticeship are two totally different things; if he were genuinely an apprentice he would not have been able to attend high school. Companies did not grant apprenticeships out of the goodness of their hearts. They expected work from the apprentices; 12 - 16 hours of it per day. Apprenticeships were formed under contract wherein the Master (in this case a company) agreed to provide training in a trade and the Apprentice agreed to furnish labor for the term of the contract. It by no means mattered how smart you were or how quickly you learned the trade- you had to stay and provide work for the entire term. So for him to have left after serving half of the two-year term means either he skipped out on it (a very common practice- heck, Ben Franklin did it) or (more likely) no such apprenticeship ever existed.
As for the last part, "it was easy for him to learn how to build diesel engines at M.A.N. corporation," go look up when Rudolf Diesel invented his eponymous engine. Yep, it was about 1893, some six years AFTER Whitehead's supposed apprenticeship. Wow, all these facts are getting more inconvenient by the minute, aren't they?
Tune in next time when we talk more about engines.
Click here to go to Part 2.
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