Decades before the term ‘Buffalo Wings’ evoked the image of a plate of fried chicken parts covered in hot sauce, the wings produced in Buffalo were covered in fabric and aluminum. Buffalo Wings flew in defense of freedom in two world wars. Machines built in Buffalo broke the sound barrier, pioneered vertical flight, lifted astronauts off the surface of the Moon, and trained others to fly the Space Shuttle. For More information about these images, go to post: “Four Aviation Milestones Produced in Buffalo.”
The Buffalowings Blog is dedicated to the industrial history of Buffalo, New York – with an emphasis on aviation and space. In the previous posts we’ve discussed the growth of industry and advances in transportation that made Buffalo one of the most important industrial cities in the United States in the nineteenth century. As we begin to look at the development of the aircraft industry in Buffalo, it is necessary to review the state of research into manned flight in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.
No one city, state, or country develops technology as complex and important as a machine capable of continuous, powered flight in a vacuum. Development in the first (roughly) 90 years of the century moved at a snail’s pace. The issues were many, but can be generally narrowed down to two. First, materials that were strong enough to withstand the forces of flight, yet light enough to get them off the ground, were almost non-existent. Shipbuilding, railroads, and skyscrapers put the ‘heavy’ in heavy industry. The materials they relied on, mostly steel, had great strength but were too heavy for flying. The second issue was finding an adequate means pf propulsion. The powerplant of the day ran on steam. A steam boiler is very heavy, requiring large amounts of fuel like wood or coal, large amounts of water to make steam, and a container strong enough to withstand the heat and pressure.
In spite of these obstacles, there was some forward progress made in the nineteenth century. Each subsequent advancement taking from the previous. Englishman Sir George Cayley applied the scientific approach, and stated the problem pretty accurately when he stated that his effort hoped “To make a surface support a given weight by applying power to the resistance of air.” Cayley’s 1804 glider flew successfully and was followed by three different full-sized versions that were large enough to carry a man. Cayley also established the general configuration of an aircraft that we are used to today – a wing mounted near the middle of a fuselage with tail surfaces aft.
An American effort was announced in an 1834 article in the Cincinnati Enquirer. A. A. Mason, “ingenious citizen,” was to make an attempt to fly in his Aerial Steamboat on the Fourth of July. The craft was literally a boat hull covered in fabric, not linen – at least acknowledging the necessity to reduce weight. There were four vertical, helicopter-like propellers, two forward and two aft to provide lift. Propulsion was to be provided by two horizontal propellers mounted on shafts extending aft. All six were to be powered by a tall steam boiler mounted in the center of the craft, a nod to the idea of weight and balance. Mason’s craft was unsuccessful and he quickly faded from the pages of the newspapers.
Two major hurdles stood in the way of achieving flight in the mid nineteenth century. One was the non-existence of a reliable, lightweight powerplant. Some held that existing technology, steam boilers, could be made small and light enough and that the other issue – aerodynamics, particularly the shape and placement of wings, had to be solved first.
In reality, solving both the aerodynamic problem and the propulsion problem was necessary – with weight being a third issue over both. But this is how progress is made. As the century progressed, advancements were made in airfoils. More progress was made by Englishman Horatio Phillips. Many of the airfoil shapes he developed for use on gliders resembled the wings we would see today. The biggest jump in powerplants came when gasoline powered engines were developed for automobiles. Smaller, lighter versions like the one built by Charles Taylor, the Wright Brother’s mechanic, literally got aviation off the ground.
Many “serious” scientists of the day still scoffed at those who attempted to build flying machines. If there was one event that began to change that outlook, it was the thirty-fifth meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Buffalo in the summer of 1886. Please come back for our next post to read more about that.