Unlocking the Sky (25 page)
Authors: Seth Shulman
Photographic insert excluded from electronic edition.
UNLOCKING THE SKY
. Copyright © 2002 by Seth Shulman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JANUARY 2008 ISBN: 9780061846939
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An engine designed by a U.S. machinist named Stephen Balzer, who is best remembered for having built the first automobile to run in the streets of New York City.
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Much to Beachey’s chagrin, however, the French aviator Adolphe Pegoud would go down in history as the world’s first aviator to successfully accomplish a single airborne loop on September 21, 1913.
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The term
aileron,
French for “little wing,” is attributed to aviation pioneer Robert Esnault-Pelterie, who experimented with them on a full-scale glider in 1904.
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Rigid parachutes, or aerodynamic braking devices, as they were sometimes called, developed considerably earlier, however. Their use dates at least to 1783 when, in the first well-recorded instance, Sebastian Lenormand used an umbrellalike contraption to descend safely after jumping from an observation tower in Montpelier, France.
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As with so many other areas of aviation history, this is a matter of some disagreement. British aviation historian Charles H. Gibbs-Smith, tracing the intellectual history of ailerons, suggests that the AEA could have learned of them from a published account of Esnault-Pelterie’s experiments with them in the January 1905 issue the French aviation journal
L’Aerophile.
1
Adapted from Alden Hatch,
Glenn Curtiss: Pioneer of Naval Aviation
(New York: Julian Messner, Inc., 1942).