Steam Powered Flight, myth and reality

(the audio portion of this piece will be available on SCIENCE IN THE NEWS, courtesy of Zen and the Art of Steampunk, in an upcoming episode)

STEAM POWERED AEROCRAFT: MYTH AND REALITY

One of the guiding principles of steampunk technology is that, quite naturally, STEAM ENGINES will be the prevelant motive power source for most vehicles.

Another genre chestnut is the assumption of aerocraft years, even decades before their historic debut. Airships and blimps as well as fixed wing aeeroplanes do not appear until quite late into the 19th century or early 20th. Now we are venturing into the land of "if it didn't exist, it ought to have"-- a niche steampunk fiction occupies without fear of censure.

Regretably, there are some limitations imposed by the sad reality of flight physics. Pre-Bessemer process 19th century Steam engines were neither light, nor particularly aerodynamic. The engine would be too heavy, and the science of flight too little advanced to provide a wing shape that could actually provide enough lift to raise the engine off the ground.

As it turns out, that assumption might be wrong. Or perhaps to state things more plainly, close enough to wrong to be right-- for purposes of fiction.



Introducing the Aerial Steam Carriage, British Patent 9478. The Aerial was a flying machine patented in 1842 (60 years before the Wright Brothers managed to get their motorized box kite to struggle off a sand dune in North Carolina). The Aerial was a prototypical flying machine from England that was designed to carry passengers and mail into the air. She was the creation of William Samuel Henson (1812 to 1888) and John Stringfellow (1799 to 1883).



The Ariel was to be a monoplane with a wing span of 150 feet, weigh 3000 lbs and was to be powered by a specially-designed lightweight steam powered engine producing 50 horse power. The wing area was to be 4500 square feet, with the tail another 1500, yielding a very low wing loading ratio (or so the inventors hoped). The inventors hoped that the Ariel would achieve a speed of 50 mph, and carry 10-12 passengers up to 1000 miles. The plan was to launch it from an inclined ramp on a 3-wheeled undercarriage.

Mr. Henson, in particular, certainly comes across as an eternal optomist. In order to raise investment monies for his aircraft, even before it was close to perfected, he had formed an Air Freight Company-- the Aerial Transit Company-- to haul passengers and mail here and there. Sadly, the investors stayed away in droves.



Reality has to creep into this discussion at some point-- the obvious fact is that Mr. Henson's model did not succeed, or we would be venerating Henson and Stringfellow over Orville and Wilbur. The reasons for failure were essentially identical to those given at the beginning of this essay-- the engine was too heavy and the wing design could not produce sufficient lift to launch the aircraft out doors.

The Aerial is of interest for steampunk afficiandos for that last sentence... a scale model of the aircraft did indeed fly inside a warehouse, or perhaps a large tent, at the apex of a long tether. Had it been possible to field a lighter, more efficient engine, or built out of lighter materials, or create a more efficient wing design.. it very well MIGHT HAVE flown. Sadly, the project collapsed, as they so often do, from lack of funding and investment, and we'll never know what might have been. But that is reality. For steampunk purposes, close enough to reality is always more than good enough.

If you are interested in the Aerial, Scientific American published a contemporary account of "the Stringfellow experiments" in 1848-- Volume 4, Issue 1, page 4.