|
Click
on the image to download a 1000
pixel wide plan.
The following extract
is from the book "James Means and the Problem of Manflight" by
his son James Howard Means. The book was published by the Smithsonian
Institution in 1964.
A blueprint and description of his first soaring machine were published in
the pamphlet of 1894. He labeled it "an instrument for making
scientific experiments." Although I was only eight years old at the
time, I can remember this apparatus very clearly. It was made of light tin
plate and pine wood. Its planes were just that - flat surfaces. A
horistonal plane served as elevator, and a fiexed vertical one as a sort
of forerunner of the fin. It was supposed to function, as do the feathers
on an arrow, to maintain, as far as possible, a straight line in a plane
perpendicular to the earth's surface. These two devices were carried at
the rear end of the soaring machine as are an elevator and fin in the tail
assembly of the modern aircraft.
Stability, both vertical
and horizontal, as well as dirigibility, was cearly in my father's
thinking from the beginning of his experimenting. In his first model,
however, he aimed only at controlling the inclination of glide, and this
he attempted to do by connecting the elevator with a free-swinging
pendulum. The pendulum to operate an automatic elevator had been patented
as early as 1888 by Beeson. James Means wrote:
"In November, 1893, I launched several of these machines
from the balcony of the tower of Boston Light, and more recently I have
experimented from the top of the cliffs at Manomet, Mass. The former
place is an ideal one for the purpose of experiment, being as it is, one
hundred and eleven feet above the seas with a straight drop of seventy
or eighty feet.
Unfortunately, a gale of wind was blowing when I visited
the light, and two of the three machines were total failures, being
badly bent by the wind before they were launched. The third machine
righted itself before reaching the ground, but the pendulum...was too
light to do efficient work."
|
