Eagle River review. [volume] (Eagle River, Wis.) 1890-1927, 1917-09-14

work the problem. But people must not be
impatient If at first our progress seems slow Only
men who have tried it know the difficulties OF
building high-power airplane motor.
In the matter of personnel, it may be noted, our
aircraft promoters believe we have great supe-
riority over the rest of the world, for this reason
1t takes an exceptional sort of to make a
good flyer. He must be quicz-witted and have the
steadiest sort of nerves. Otherwise he comes to
grief and srnasles an expensive machine. Men of
this type volunteered extensively in Britain and
Canada early in the war They constituted the
armies that went into the battle line without
adequate artillery protection and so were largely
destroyed. The same forces operated to destroy
the strong and vigorous young men of France and
Germany who would have made good aviators.
So today America is the greatest reservoir in the
world of the right sort Of material for the per
sonnet of the aircraft serrice While the other
countries are having difficulty in getting proper
men for flyers--Engand has invited to send
to her aviation schools because she cannot
keep them tilled-our problem is merely to train
them and provide them with equipment.
asked Mr.. Wright what speed plane we might
expect to develop
1T is complicated problem the limit Of useful
speed" he replied. "a good many reckless state
ments are made the subject by persons with
vivid imagnations. 1t is safe to say there are
machines on the western front that can make 40
miles hour So far as speed is concerned there
are no inherent impossibilities in developing
plane that might make as high two hundred
miles an hour. The difficulty is in the landing
"A machines landing speed is about half it's
maximum speed That is, if plane is designed
to make speed of fifty miles hour its wings
will not sustain it in the air if it travels slower
than twenty-five miles. It must be moving at
epeed of at least twenty-five miles an hour to
make a successful landing. So a plane with
speed Of $50 miles an hour cannot land at speed
of much less than sxty-five miles
From the field we drove to the laboratory. 1t
is simply development of the crude shop in
which he and his brother together worked out the
problem of air dght. The airpane was no lucky
find 1t not developed by rule OF thumb.
Wilbur and Orville Wright, sons of a Dayton
United Brethren bishop, after getting through high
school. set up a bicycle repair shop. They had a
natural taste for mechanics and for sports. TWEEN
tyone years ago they became interested in the ex-
periments of Lenthal, the German experimenter
In a glider His death attracted their attention to
his work. For two years they worked on data
and laws that other. Investigators had produced,
only to find that the work so far done was
worthless.
SO in their own shop in Dayton they devised a
wind tInnel"--a chute through which air
blast was driven by electric fan, and set to
work measuring the resistances of curved sur
faces by wonderfully ingenious method of their
own devising BY a long series of exact measure
lnents and elaborate mathematical calculations in
yolying sines and cosines and such, they worked
out the problem Of the curvature of The planes
and of the propelers.
The problems of balance We're enormously in
trcate. But these, too, they solved. They We're
pioneers. They had to discover the difficulties
and then find the way out. So they had to de-
wise the methods. 1t took unlimited patience
resourcefulness and hard thinking to win success.
Both the brothers were primarily scientific men.
They were impatient to devote themselves TO the
scientific side of furthering
\ the development of aeronau-
~ tics. But they necessarily
71l-T II had to finance companies,
~ fight patent suits and
I@Z duct the business of estab-
eAz11seasS1@g fishing a industry.
,MN@8 Wilbur Wright died five
years ago. and in 1915 Or
" vile Wright was able to dis
pose of his business inter-
ests and devote himself to
the scientific work where his heart has always