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

ED edstoller at earthlink.net
Mon Sep 5 17:22:47 PDT 2005


Nice post Rich.

Some find there way down to Dayton Ohio from the Portland Indiana show.
Besides the Air Force Museum, there is a National Park Service, Historical
Site which has a lot on the Wright Brothers , Charles Kettering ( Ignitions)
and DELCO ( generators). It is located at Carillon Park,  www.
carillonpark.org

Ed Stoller
New Fairfield, CT


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Richard Allen" <linstrum55 at yahoo.com>
To: "Stationary Engine List" <sel at lists.stationary-engine.com>
Sent: Monday, September 05, 2005 6:58 AM
Subject: [SEL] Sort of on-topic: The First Aircraft Engine


> 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
>
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