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Sale 101
Lot 179
Wright, Orville -- Fantastic Content 3½-Page TLS on the Pendulum as a Stabilizing Agent, Soaring Experiments, & Mentions His Brother's Death (1871-1948) Younger of the Wright Brothers, the inventors and aviation pioneers who were the first to achieve powered, controlled and sustained flight (in 1903 -- with Orville at the stick) and flew the first practical airplane (in 1905). Following Wilbur Wright's death in 1912, Orville continued to experiment and innovate, serving as one of the foremost aeronautics authorities of the age. Typed letter signed "Orville Wright," 3½ pages, on "The Wright Company / Dayton, Ohio" letterhead, 11 x 8½", April 7, 1915. To Frederick Epplesheimer at The New York Herald, disagreeing with a group of scientific and engineering societies who had reported that the pendulum was not a proper stabilizing agent. A signed passport-size photo of Epplesheimer is present.
Wright says, in part: "I believe the pendulum is in itself an almost perfect device for preserving lateral balance. I have flown by the hour with such a device, a good deal of the time in winds of fifteen to twenty miles, yet I was unable to detect any case in which the pendulum did not give the proper direction in the operation of the machine. The only troubles we had with the device was in the electrical mechanism between the pendulum and the aeroplane controls….I now have a machine at our flying field so equipped that when the weather becomes suitable and I have the time, I expect to resume the experiments. The pendulum shows exactly the proper bank the machine should take in making a turn. In this respect it is very far ahead of a machine that is manually controlled, because the pendulum operates in slight changes of angle, which the aviator is not able to feel. I note what you say in regard to soaring and hovering flights. A flying machine would only be able to hover in one spot when flying in a strong wind. I had hoped to resume the soaring experiments before this time, but since my brother's death, legal and other business matters have prevented me from doing so. It is a question whether man will ever be able to soar like a bird, on account of his greater spread of wings. It is evident that a bird with a wing spread of only five or six feet can circle in a space not more than a fifth or a sixth of that which would be required for a man-carrying flying machine…." He goes on to explain this and then describes what occurred in Montgomery, Alabama in 1910 when he was flying with a power machine and the machine got held up by a trend of air: "I had made a flight to a height of about 3,000 feet and was descending at a rather rapid rate with the power turned to its lowest, when at a height of about 1,500 feet, I got into a rising trend of air which stopped all progress downward, although I pointed the machine downward as steep as I considered safe. I flew in this way without being able to decrease my height for a space of five minutes, until finally I began to become freightened…The conditions met with in this case were certainly unusual. I have never met with anything like this in all of my flying about Dayton. I think that either you or Mr. Stiles told me…that Curtiss had adopted the single acting aileron system of control in his school machines. It seems that he has had to abandon it and now is back to the old style of control again in all of the machines at San Diego…." Estimate $7,500 - UP
Ex Charles Hamilton auction, March 3, 1974.
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| Realized $6,300 |
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