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Aviation History
1942
1942 - 1199.PDF
JUNE 4TH, 1943 FLIGHT 565 AD ASTRA A Pioneer Reviews Thirty Years of Flying : Lessons to be Learned from Past Mistakes : The Army and the Air WILBUR WRIGHT Memorial Lecture for 1942. By the Rt. Hon. Lord Brabazon of Tara, M.C., P.C., F.R.Ae.S., Vice-President of the Society, ^pelivered before the Royal Aeronautical Society on Thursday, May 28th, 1942, in the Lecture Hall of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. I WANT first of all to pay my very sincere thanks to the Council of the Royal Aero nautical Society for having invited me to give the Wilbur Wright Memorial Lecture. It is a high honour to be chosen, and I have derived pleasure and instruction from listening to, I think, nearly all of them. The time is arriving, however, when those selected will be of such tender years—I speak, of course, comparatively—as not to have known the Wright era. I go back to those days, and in that I do, I think the incredulity as to the possibility of flight in those days is not now sufficiently appreciated. Anyone experimenting was dubbed a crank rather like someone, seeking perpetual motion, amiable but still a lunatic. The United States Patent Office, until the Wrights demonstrated their gliding ability, was chary of all applications for patents concerning flying machines, classing them with perpetual motion and the philosopher's stone. "Pigs might fly " was the height of impossibility, till I had the honour and privilege myself of taking one up. No more distinguished passenger was ever given a flight as it turned the impossible into the pos sible. The Daily Mail that offered a prize of ^10,000 for the first flight from London to Manchester met with a torrent of ridicule from all its contemporaries. Gliding there had been. The growing efficiency of angles of glide had not been appreciated by engineers as showing a diminishing demand for horse-power that would ensure sus- " Flight " photograph. At Eastchurch in 1909. From left to right: Orville and Wilbur Wright, Horace Short, who built the first six Wright machines in this country, and Mr. Griffith Brewer, who was managing director of the British Wright company. tained flight. If steam had had to be relied upon as a prime mover, the conquest of the air would have been delayed, but the Wright brothers would have produced a suitable engine themselves, like perhaps the heroic engine by Maxim, as that was the stuff of which they were made. Flight was, however, the child of the internal-combustion engine, but even here the Wrights made their own—a very remarkable achievement. Their patent strikes one as odd to-day. Their claim was that lateral stability could not be effected without a modicum of control on movement of the aircraft about a vertical axis. Whether stabilising trailing planes would have avoided the patent it is now useless to discuss, because the Wrights' English friends who formed the British Wright Company-Ltd., which owned the patent, sold the military use to th*British Government, and freed the civil use for the British aircraft industry. Between 1903 and 1908 there was singularly little news of what the Wright brothers were doing. O. Chanute, " Flight " photograph. . a small part in those early days of which I am proud, by winning a prize of £1,000 given by the Daily Mail for the first flight of a circular mile on an all-British machine."
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