[SEL] Sort of on-topic: The First Aircraft Engine

[Richard Allen]

For a diagram and an article about the very first aircraft engine, go
to:

http://www.curtisswright.com/history/1901-1920.asp

The first aircraft engine was pretty amazing for the time, but so were
the two brothers and their machinist friend who designed and built it.
The Wright Brothers and their bicycle shop machinist friend Charlie
Taylor built the engine in a fairly short amount of time. The Wrights
and Taylor had already built two engines before completing the third
engine that was used to power their first flight, though, so they did
have a bit of experience. The first engine had been built in 1901,
about eighteen months before their first attempt at making a multiple
cylinder aircraft engine. Their 1901 engine was a 4-stroke cycle single
cylinder that had a 6-inch bore and a 7-inch stroke. It was air-cooled
and on their Prony brake dynamometer it cranked out 3 horsepower at 447
rpm. They built it to run the lathe, drill press, and milling machine
in their bicycle manufacturing machine shop. Interestingly, it was
fueled with a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, otherwise known
as “producer gas” or “illuminating gas”, a man-made utility fuel made
by reacting steam with coal in a gas works or “gas house”. This was the
gas capable of killing a human or animal in a matter of minutes or even
seconds if someone stuck his/her head in a cooking oven with the gas
turned on. Since producer gas was tantamount to using deadly hydrogen
cyanide gas as a household fuel, its use was discontinued around 85 or
90 years ago. Even though it hasn’t been around for a long time,
putting one’s head in the oven with the gas turned on is still
considered to be a way to commit suicide, but nowadays it is only a
myth since methane or propane are not toxic and are only lethal when
inhaled in concentrations high enough to displace air, which causes
simple asphyxiation from lack of oxygen. One feature of producer gas is
that its octane or anti-knock rating is well over 100 and its use
avoided pre-ignition knock, a problem that plagued their aircraft
engines because of the poor quality 60-octane equivalent petroleum
distillate fuels available in 1903. The Wright’s first four cylinder
engine intended to power their aircraft had a “square” bore and stroke
of 4 inches, giving it a c.i.d. of 201 cubic inches. It delivered 12
horsepower at 1000 rpm. During testing in their Dayton, Ohio, bicycle
shop, it seized when they adjusted the fuel mixture to be very rich to
keep the exhaust valves cooler and in the process washed all the
lubrication from the cylinder walls. Better for it to have seized in
the Ohio shop where they built it instead of far off Kitty Hawk.
Unfortunately it destroyed the aluminum block and they had to have
another cast. Their second aircraft engine suffered a somewhat similar
fate. Once installed in their aircraft it only ran the one single day
of December 17, 1903 when they flew, and was destroyed when the wind
blew the parked airplane over, smashing the heavy engine onto the
ground and cracking its block. Altogether, the Wrights built around 200
engines of their first design, slowly improving the parts for
reliability and increasing the performance to 16 horsepower.


Rich

~:/+\:~:/+\:~:/+\:~:/+\:~:/+\:~:/+\:~:/+\:~:/+\:~:/+\:~:/+\: