The story of brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright begins in a bicycle shop in Ohio, USA. The Wright brothers' dream was to fly and they invented and built strange machines from old bicycle parts and other parts they created themselves
It all started with two brothers in a bike shop
The story of brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright begins in a bicycle shop in Ohio, USA. The Wright brothers' dream was to fly and they invented and built strange machines from old bicycle parts and other parts they made themselves.
Their first successes were with gliders - they did manage to glide, but gliding depends on the mercy of the wind and the weather, and this was not enough for the brothers. They dreamed of an aircraft that they could control, direct in the air and travel great distances. Their next challenge was a motorized aircraft, but they could not find a suitable engine - no engine manufacturer at that time knew how to produce an engine strong enough and light enough. The brothers had no choice but to build such an engine themselves.
On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright took off for the first time in the air in a strange machine that we now call an airplane. The first flight lasted only 59 seconds for a distance of 260 m and went down in history as the first flight in a manned and motorized plane.
In the following years, the Wright brothers continued to develop new and more advanced generations of airplanes. They did not publicize their successes until they were able to register patents and obtain commercial contracts. In 1908 the brothers went to France to unveil their invention and it created a great excitement around the world. A year later, the American Army approached them to produce special planes for it, and the "Flying Brothers" established the Wright Company for the production and marketing of aircraft. The rest, as they say, is history.
Since then, every year on December 17, aviation enthusiasts come to the beach in the town of Kitty Hawk in North Carolina in the USA, from where the Wright brothers took off in their first flight, to mark the anniversary of that historic flight. This year the world marks 112 years since the beginning of the era of modern aviation, so we took the opportunity to talk with Prof. Avi Seifert, head of the aerodynamics laboratory from the School of Mechanical Engineering of Tel Aviv University.
Finding methods to reduce fuel consumption
Prof. Seifert heads a research group that tries to develop active flow control methods that use innovative flow plants, which together with an array of sensors and control systems are able to change the characteristics of the flow field - layered (movement in parallel layers without interruption between the layers) and turbulent (flow fluid in an irregular manner). All these methods have a common goal - to improve the aerodynamics of the fluid flow around and inside bodies, thus improving the efficiency and reducing the energy consumption (the fuel needed to drive) of various vehicles.
So what has changed in the world of aviation since the Wright brothers' first flight?
"There is no doubt that today aviation is an everyday thing. Today's planes are faster and bigger, more comfortable, quieter and above all more efficient, electric and computerized," says Prof. Seifert. "The efficiency of the propulsion systems has increased significantly and the air pollution emitted from the propulsion systems has also been reduced - the particulate, chemical and acoustic."
Is it correct to say that there was gradual progress, but no revolutions in the field?
"It is absolutely true. The progress of aviation is gradual, and it is due to the fact that it is a field in which human lives depend," replies Prof. Seifert. "The industry is very conservative also because of the high cost of developing and manufacturing airplanes. There is a reason that today in the world there are only two companies that manufacture large passenger planes - Airbus and Boeing. The period of time that passes between the beginning of the planning of a new plane and the time it goes on the market can reach 20-10 years. The economic investment is huge and there are no incentives in such a market for big bets. The newer and more experimental technologies can be seen in military aircraft (where the need for innovation is very great) or in drones and other unmanned vehicles, where mistakes do not usually cost human lives."
"But it is important to understand that in this field every small change is very significant. A reduction in the fuel consumption of airplanes, even by a few percentages, can mean a saving of billions in fuel consumption and also a significant reduction in the air pollution produced by the airplane. The same is true for fast ground transportation systems, such as heavy vehicles on the highway and large wind turbines."
Watch Prof. Avraham Seifert talk about the unique patent he developed in aircraft engineering and its advantages
The challenges on the way to private flying vehicles
And what are the remaining challenges in the field? "The most significant technological barrier today stems from the approach of flight speed to the speed of sound. When flying at such speeds, shock waves are created on the aircraft, which significantly increase fuel consumption. Even if technology exists that can enable faster commercial flight, it does not make economic sense. In order for the airlines to invest in faster planes a little more, they would have to double or triple the price of the plane tickets, and it is clear that this is not realistic pricing, even in exchange for the significant reduction in flight time, especially due to the need for prolonged security and safety checks before and after each flight."
"I believe that in the future we will see developments in the field of personal aircraft - a private flying vehicle, electric and completely autonomous, which can take off from the roof or yard of our house to the destination we want to reach. But the road to such aircraft is still long. The cost of such a trip is more expensive using current technologies by a factor of tens of meters compared to traveling to the same destination by car, due to the high energy consumption and the production cost of the aircraft itself. Beyond the cost, there is the issue of safety - how do we avoid accidents in a theoretical situation of thousands of flying vehicles in a limited air volume? The automatic management of the airspace is one of the main problems."
"The solution to these problems is found in intensive research in many centers around the world and also at Tel Aviv University, with the development in the field of artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles. The cost of production will also drop significantly. Progress is also committed in the field of high-quality and cheap XNUMXD printing, the use of composite materials and the invention of new and lighter materials and advanced methods of flight and flow control."
Until the flying cars arrive that will save us all the time of standing in traffic jams, we can say thank you to the Wright brothers whose dream to reach the sky changed the world we all live in.
5 תגובות
Safkan
The one who writes nonsense is you. As usual - you read some stupid book and decided to go crazy.
And as usual - you dismiss any source that does not fit your agenda.
Get a life…
The problem with airplanes in Wright's time was not engine power but the lack of control of the airplane. Already decades (?) before the Wright brothers built airplanes that crashed immediately after takeoff because they lost their balance. There was nothing to do with the engine power house (which was sufficient) and the crashes.
As bicycle experts, the Wright brothers understood the importance of solving the balance problem and how to use the resistance forces of air to stabilize the balance of the plane while it is moving, the stabilization is with the help of wings as well as with the help of a XNUMXD rudder that steered the plane in three dimensions. (As far as I remember, at least at the early stage, they registered a patent only for the steering wheel, they published the design of the complex wings somewhere without registering a patent, but no one but them understood the complexity of the wings).
The Wright brothers built a laboratory (including a wind tunnel) where they tested the movement of the airplane in the air using flight simulation (and the effect of the forces of the air flow on the surface of the wings). The Wright brothers meticulously recorded all their experiments and derived lessons from them to improve the structure of the airplane's wings. The description of their actions as if they made an airplane from scrap and did not understand exactly what they were doing is a false description: they acted in a planned manner according to procedures practiced by development engineers. They had nothing to study in institutions because the science of aeronautics did not exist in their time, they invented its basics. Not everything can be learned in educational institutions.
It is not that the Wright brothers did not want to publish their invention, they made a maximum effort to publish it and were ignored. What happened is that people to whom the Wright brothers turned looked down on them and did not finance their development. The newspapers referred to them as useless toy builders.
Out of desperation, the Wright brothers went to Europe for air shows - maybe there they would find an investor. Finally they found an American industrialist (according to my memory) who was impressed by the invention and promoted it to the stage of a commercial product.
The example of the Wright brothers is cited today as an example of how establishment factors disdain innovations simply because they deviate from conventions and transform the history of airplanes into the history of "cold fusion" (low-intensity nuclear reactors = LENR). The history of cold fusion is institutionally ignored and boycotted by academia.
The Academy of Physics boycotts the science of cold fusion, LENR, and calls it pseudoscience, even though it has great proven successes.
It is expected that the commercialization of Andrea Rossi's ECAT type cold fusion reactors will begin within the next ten years. There is no fear - after the reactors seem to be successful, the Academy of Physics will smear and say that it was a partner in the development of cold reactors, while in reality it is an obstacle to development. The construction of a cold reactor without scientific proof is intended, among other things, to break the boycott of the scientific establishment.
In February 2016, the field test of the Russian ECAT reactor is about to end, the test is for approximately one year, a continuous test around the clock. The experiment is designed to test whether this reactor is ready for marketing (the problem of its scientific correctness has been proven for a long time, currently we are dealing with the commercial applicability which is a much more complicated matter than scientific correctness). The field experiment is supervised by dozens of people and is supposed to be a historic achievement in physics, but from past experience there will be a general silence regarding the scientific success if the test ends successfully. (Silence and silence as they have been for the past 26 years). In addition to silence, a major slander of Andrea Rossi is expected in order to stop the revolutionary development (the stoppage and failure is probably mainly because he endangers various institutional factors who want to freeze the existing situation in the energy economy). My guess is that the one who will buy a large amount of ECAT reactors (once they are mature) is the Chinese government, because they need the energy and because they have no interest in stopping the development of LENR reactors.
Those who want to regularly and reliably follow the development process of ECAT can do so through the website
http://www.e-catworld.com by FRANK AKLAND.
Don't waste time looking at the English WIKIPEDIA - there is mostly nonsense there and they are an inseparable part of the institutional boycott.
As 11-year-old children in the kibbutz, we were so amazed by the story of the Wright brothers, that we decided to build airplanes ourselves.
We built gliders with a 7 meter wingspan which we flew on the football field with a tractor pulling them. Hera 1 and Hera 2 crashed on the first flight, and 1 is noted in 11 (the names were given in retrospect). We had almost already connected a refurbished fire engine engine with a homemade propeller to Hara 3, but the kibbutz saw that the broken engine was working (after working on it for two weeks) and confiscated it.
Hera 3 also crashed on the first flight.
I am still amazed that none of the huge corporations in America and Europe have developed an airplane. The physical equivalent of the Wright brothers could be Faraday, who almost without education developed the concept of electric and magnetic fields to which Maxwell gave the mathematical formalism.
Israel Shapira
And perhaps it was precisely because they lacked formal education that they achieved this feat. Think of another option. Two brothers are self-taught by nature and have the ability to think creatively on the verge of genius. Sometimes the difference between an amateur in a certain field and a person who is his profession is only on the first of the month.
The achievement of the Wright brothers is especially great if you take it in the connotation of the beginning of the 20th century.
After all, the industry, especially in the field of transportation, was developed and bustling. Automobiles, a coast-to-coast train network, and ships the size of the Titanic cross oceans.
And so it is interesting that the most important invention perhaps - the airplane - was invented by two uneducated bike builders from Ohio.
America at its best.