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

[Rick Rowlands]

Cic you happen to see the giant C&G Cooper Corliss engine while you were 
there?

Rick

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "ED" <edstoller at earthlink.net>
To: "The SEL email discussion list" <sel at lists.stationary-engine.com>
Sent: Monday, September 05, 2005 8:22 PM
Subject: Re: [SEL] Sort of on-topic: The First Aircraft Engine


> 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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