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Aviation History
1946
1946 - 0007.PDF
JANUARY 3RD, 1946 FLIGHT 1866... AND ALL THA T The Royal Aeronautical Society Celebrates its 80th Birthday : A Very Remarkable History By CAPT. J. LAWRENCE PRITCHARD, Hon. M.I.Ae.S., Hon. F,R.Ae.S. ON January 12th, 1946, the Royal Aeronautical Societycelebrates its 80th birthday. It is the oldest aero-nautical society in the world. It is the fashion for members of a society or an institu- tion to say that the body to which they belong is not as good as it was. The reputation of any engineering society always higher outside its ranks than in it, and higher outside its country of origin. That is an odd point, luse the reputation of such a body depends, in the long run, upon that of its individual members and their achieve- ments. On that basis alone the Royal Aeronautical Society has every reason to be proud of its long history and of the achievements of its members. It was an achievement, in any case, to start such an organisation in 1866, and for one of its Members of Council, Wenham, to deliver the first public lecture before the Society in that year on heavier- than-air aircraft—this at a time when there appeared no possibility of such a machine flying in the lifetime of any of those present. The Council, at their meeting on August 24th, 1866, passed a resolution to form a committee to. investigate " the laws of resistance of inclined sur- faces moving in elastic and non-elastic fluids, air and water, and the resultant forces obtained at right angles to the direction of motion." Nearly forty years before an aircraft flew, the Council was approaching the problem of flight in a scientific way and trying to cut away the vast undergrowth of specula- tion and undirected experiments which had brought only ridicule on all those who had attempted to solve the prob- lem of flight. In 1868, at the Crystal Palace, the Society held an Aero- nautical Exhibition, the first ever staged in this country. No fewer than seventy-seven exhibits were shown, includ- ing engines, lighter- and heavier-than-air models, kites and plans of projected machines. The Society had offered a prize of ^ioo for the engine with the lowest weight/horse-power ratio, and sixteen cnsnnps ww entered for the prize. It was won by John | 1868 ; 1870 ! 1872 1 1881 ! 1886 R.A«.S., in :— : : Held an aircraft exhibition. i : Conducted wind-tunnel ex- • periments. j : Recognised the existence of ! boundary-layer problems. • : Discussed supersonic speeds, j : Heard a lecture on jet pro- ! pulsion. ! The model trjplane into which Stringfellow fitted the steam engine which won the R.Ae.S. £100 prize in 1868. Stringfellow with a steam engine for driv- ing his model aircraft. With its boiler, the engine weighed only 13 lb. and devel- oped one horse-power. It took seven minutes to reach its full working pressure of 100 Ib./sq. in. Stringfellow fitted his engine into a model triplane, which embodied many of the constructional features of the aircraft of to-day. The authorities at the Crystal Palace would not allow a free flight within the building and the model had to be suspended from a wire. '' It was seen that after a certain velocity had been obtained," said the Juror's report, "the machine left the support of the wire and rose up." So good were Stringfellow's models, indeed, that one had flown as early as 1847 when he was carrying out ex- periments with Hcnson. But for the lack of suitable light motive power the conquest of the air would have been accomplished many years before it actually was. The Society held a number of lec- tures during the run of the exhibition and at one of these Thomas Moy, a powerful advocate of the heavier- than-air machine, drew attention to the importance of speed. "I would advise you," he said in the discussion of one paper, "to think of nothing less than 150 miles per hour, as speed will gain the day and nothing less than that speed." The same sentiments, with a different figure of speed, are being expressed at the Society's meetings nearly eighty years later. First Wind Tunnel At that early meeting, too, E. W. Young pointed out that a wing with a curved section would give a better result than a flat plane, and urged the Society to provide "a large fan, capable of producing a current of air of different velocities," to test his suggestion. Two years later the Council appointed an experimental committee, and under the direction of F. H. Wenham the first wind-tunnel experiments in the world were carried out, and the results published in the Annual Report for 1871. That was a very remarkable achievement. Many of the problems or forms of construction which are now common- place were foreseen and talked about at these early meetings of the Society. In 1872, James Glaisher, who was in the chair at one of the lecture meet- ings, drew attention to the problem of the boundary layer. "The parti- cles of the fluid which come in con- tact with the plane have somehow or other to get out of the way, by gliding along the surface of the plane, and this produces a complication in the neighbourhood of the surface of such a kind as cannot theoretically be pre- dicted." At the same meeting Mr. Brooke pointed out the importance of aspect ratio. Three years previously, in photograph
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