Curtiss-Goupil Duck
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- Опубликовано: 25 авг 2024
- The tale of the Curtiss-Goupil Duck is an interesting anecdote that starts in the very early days of aviation. Unusually, it’s an aircraft whose capability for flight was neither for the purposes of experiment nor commerce. Its intent was to prove that the Wright Brothers did not invent lateral control.
Dangerous by Kevin MacLeod
Link: incompetech.fi...
Stock footage provided by www.pond5.com
I have always considered Glenn Curtiss to be an interesting figure and appreciate your treatment of him in your work. I remember seeing photos of the June Bug as a kid and thinking it looked like an improvement over the Wright Bros. at the time. Thanks Jerry - again. I love this stuff....
Very glad you enjoyed it. I'm sure Glen Curtiss will appear again, probably in a biography, and definitely in later aircraft.
Hands down! no contest... the strangest looking flying machine ever
Randomly found this video. It was very cool! Good work.
It is yes, it's brilliant. 😁
we'll you did it again. great pictures. never new this story.
the wrights might have been right but they weren't right. in the beginning i saw the airfoil and dyhedral and thought if it had power it should fly and then the picture of it flying. it's about as close to a bird shape as a mechanical engineer could make. goupil was a clever ol' duck. what stopped us from flying several times in history was not the inability to copy the shape but the power to create wind up to flying speed. thank you
Glad you enjoyed it! The Wright Brothers and their inspirations, and the work of those who had gone before them make for a fascinating and little-known piece of history. Goupil was a genius to put together something that later on proved it could fly. Glenn Curtiss, and / or his team, fall into the genius category for realising that there were aircraft before 1903 that could not only fly, but demonstrate lateral control, and then find one, and for all that can be said negatively about the Wrights, they were geniuses to put together all the disparate parts of aviation technology to achieve what they did.
Very good considering you had so little time to research. Informative!
Glad to hear it! In fact most of the information in that video was rattling around in my head already. Some has been in previous presentations. The only really new bit was the aircraft itself, and there's not much information about it. One thing about doing this kind of channel is that you end up with a head full of bits and pieces of information, and all it requires is something new to pull it together.
G'day,
Yay Team !
A couple of points...
# 1, Ailerons were patented in New Zealand in 1903 by Richard (Mad Dick) Pearse, who first became Airborne under power with a home-made Engine in May of that year - six months before the Wrights, but he didn't have any Rudder and thus once airborne "P-Factor" plus Aileron-Drag yawed him sideways, and then he hit the 10-ft high Gorse Hedge bounding his paddock, and perched atop of it.
In Kiwiland the Farmers used Hedgerows instead of Fences, and Pearse was uninterested in farming so he habitually neglected to trim his Hedges and thus EVERY time he tried to fly he finished up on top of his own unruly Hedge.
In 1913 he decided not to renew his Patent..., a mistake which haunted him because if he'd spent the Renewal Fee then he could have charged the British Empire a Royalty on every Aeroplane in the Imperium which employed Ailerons until 1923...
He eventually died in a Madhouse in about 1956, and his final Flying Machine was moved from his backyard Garage to the Museum of Transport & Travel (in Aukland I think that is - I'm an Aussie not a Kiwi so my grasp of their Geography is minimal).
And, regards Wing Warping...
In about 1983 or so Ron Wheeler finally bowed to market pressure, accepting that nobody was buying his Mk-2 Skycraft Scouts because their 2-Axis Controls had killed several people who tried to Turn while Descending, and Centrifugal Force locked them into a Spiral Dive because they had no way of levelling their Wings...(!) ; so the Mark-3 Skycraft Scout was his answer - featuring Wing Warping, using Pulleys & Cables to increase the Camber on one Wing while feeding Slack Cable to enable the opposite Wingtip Skin to "float up"...
However, while Wing Warping enabled people to escape the Graveyard Spiral, the rest of the Ultralight Industry was offering vastly better performance than Single-Surface Wings, and regardless of choice of Engine (18 Hp Fuji Robin or 35 Hp Rotax 377) the fact was that anybody who was sufficiently knowledgeable and experienced as to be able to safely fly a Skycraft Scout was also sufficiently knowledgable as to buy a better Aeroplane for the same money.
I never flew a Mk-3 Scout, but my best friend died in his, in 1995.
Backtrack me to either my "Warbles In The Wilderness..." or "Personal Aeroplanology..." Playlist, therein to search for,
"REQUIEM FOR A REDHEAD...; Crash-Analysis of John William Robson & His 35 Hp Mk-3 Skycraft Scout."
to unpack that whole story, and (Hooray !) it was not the Wing Warping which caused his Crash, either.
Just(ifiably ?) sayin'.
The Skycraft Scout was literally a Hang Glider (a type called a "Tweety" or "Tweetie") which had all-flying Tail-Surfaces..., and using Weight-shift for control in Roll ; so when Ron Wheeler added a Seat, Wheels, and an Engine - the overall effect very greatly resembled Alberto Santos-Dumont's "Demoiselle", cobbled-up and tinkered from Aluminium Sailboat-Masts and Dacron with a Bicycle-Chain driven Propeller and a Lawnmower Motor.
So, I dunno about the 19th Century Patents on Ailerons - that might be a bit of a stretch-claim ; but the 1903 New Zealand Patent by Pearse definitely predates that of the Wrights....; and the last PRODUCTION Aircraft to be made and sold new, featuring Wing Warping - was the 1983 Mk-3 Skycraft Scout, both the Robin & Rotax versions, and the one which killed Canada John even came with a set of FLOATS (!).
Just(ifiably ?) sayin',
Have a good one...
Stay safe.
;-p
Ciao !
Very interesting on many levels. The Goupil reminded me of Butusov's glider that was sponsored by Chanute but of course that was a failure (The book by David Gierke on Herring is relevant here). I know about the Boulton patent from the contemporary Aeronautical Journals but maybe more relevant is the wing design drawing by Moullard in 'Le Vol Sans Battement' since it must have been known earlier by Chanute and probably shared with the Wrights. Moullard's drawing shows ailerons but they are not, as in the Wright patent, coupled to the rudder and would, like the Wrights, have produced adverse yaw. I think Herring may have had an insight on this although he focussed on weight-shift for his glider and powered flights. Then there is Cody who everyone seems to forget. He was using wing warping to control his Carrier kite from a very early period, certainly before the Wright patent. His glider of 1905 used small aileron-like surfaces that were effectively servo-tabs to assist the wing warping. This was extended to his differential fore-plane from 1909 on his British Army Aeroplane No.1 which coupled these with the wing warping/ailerons. There may be some link from Cody to Esnault Pelterie but the basic warping for the kites was earlier. As for the Wrights....they received a lot of material from Chanute but I am not convinced that Chanute himself really understood the aerodynamics although the Wright's analytical mindset would have drawn the correct conclusions. It was a very strange period....thanks for the video. And Huffaker....?
You're tapping into what I meant when I said that the whole story would require several full length documentaries to cover. As Curtiss demonstrated, there was a lot of information "out there" that was certainly known, if not in its entirety then in pieces, to the pioneers of the late 19th and early 20th century. It's not known what prior knowledge Esnault-Pelterie had about ailerons, but I do find it interesting that he did not, as far as I can tell, patent them, though he did have at least one patent regarding wing-warping. The incident that lead to him using ailerons was, of course, partly instigated by Chanute publishing erroneous information about the Wrights 1902 glider, which leads to speculation that either he didn't understand what he was publishing, or that it was done deliberately. However what we do come to understand from your comment, and from my own work, is that even by 1903, there was nothing really new under the aeronautical sun except for implementation. This should not, incidentally, be seen as putting down the Wrights work, because taking disparate knowledge and technology together to create a working product is its own form of genius.
The Wights were the first to solve powered flight, not because they were skilled at implementing the ideas of those who had gone before them, but because they discovered that their predecessors were fundamentally wrong about the science of flight. For example, the Wrights had been using Lilienthal's coefficient tables, which were considered indispensable at the time, but were getting nowhere until they built their wind tunnel for lab testing and discovered those tables were in no way connected to reality. It is too bad they insisted on the patent fight. Once the cat, so to speak, was out of the bag the more rough and ready individuals like Curtiss were going to carry aviation forward.
The Wrights were highly self disciplined and methodical engineers when it came to flight. Curtiss approached them with his superior engines but the Wrights wanted nothing to do with outsiders. “What could of been”…..While the Wrights solved the problem of controlled powered flight their insistence on a patent certainly held aviation back almost two decades. It begs the question of what American airplanes could have been capable of by WW1 if Curtiss-Wright had been formed many years before it actually did. Imagine what the minds of the Wrights Brothers could have produced with the engines, the power that Curtiss could have gave them plus all the interesting designs by others at that time. America certainly would have been a world leader in aviation during and before WW1. Imagine what the 1920’s and 1930’s would have produced if American aviation hadn’t stagnated in the early years. Fascinating to ponder.
Hi Jerry, I’m enjoying the videos on the more obscure aircraft, any chance you could do one on the WW1 mini fighters the Grain Kitten and the Eastchurch Kitten.
Thanks.
I like this series alot. Relatively little is known about the origins of powered flight since it often overlaps with the work of glider pioneers like Otto Lilienthal. What is relavant to all this is to understand the devellopment of the internal combustion engine and the power to weight issue that came with it. Many people tried to solve the puzzle untill finally the Wrights did so in 1903.
An equally important fact regarding Glenn Curtiss is the fact that he was.... my great grandmother's 2nd cousin. 😄
isn't it interesting, that in the age of the robber barons,
the Wrights felt it necessary to "patent" flight,
and that a little more than 2 decades later the 2 entities
that Glenn Curtiss and The Wrights had started,
had merged to become the first flight conglomerate...
(I won't go all polemical)
I find it hard to fault the Wrights for wanting to, as you say, patent flight and build on their "first flight." I think their mistake was that they let themselves be sidetracked by this, rather than do what other pioneers did and continue to build upon their design successes, and file patents on aspects of that. However I have a sneaking suspicion that they weren't really very good designers. That they never put a proper undercarriage on their aircraft, and needed a launching rail to get off the ground, speaks volumes.
@@Forgotten_Aviation I agree; it was the style of the times to try and cash in on anything one could, regardless of how "good" it may have been, and the preferred methoed was by patent applications.
@@Forgotten_Aviation That’s an interesting point, they certainly got left behind very quickly, but wouldn’t there have been a lot of problem solving design required to make their own engines? And I’d assume some kind of methodical design processes since they were able to make their own tables of lift, it’s not like they were using blind trial and error.
I wonder what their financial situation was, Maybe they thought it best to start making money by patients, training pilots and selling their flier rather then continuously pouring money into changing things? Obviously a bad choice in the end as there was so mu to learn.
@@electricalmayhem There's a lot they could have done differently. It's easy with hindsight to criticise, I admit. I think they misjudged how far they were ahead of the competition. In 1906 they thought it would take five years for others to catch up. Along with their penchant for secrecy, this might have been their greatest mistakes. They refused to perform publicly for five years and were beaten out by less cautious competitors, by which time their technology gap had been erased. By not acknowledging the competition and getting involved earlier they were not being competitive. They refused to upgrade their designs and that hurt them badly. They were rather ponderous businessmen and that hurt them as well. Their aircraft were also very expensive and so they were undercut.
😺😺😺
A little different, isn't it? I had no idea this aircraft existed until yesterday, nor its connection with Glenn Curtiss, the Wright Brothers and their patent war.
@@Forgotten_Aviation Very different but its an important subject in regards to the historic patent issue.
I thought so.
I reckon this man has the right to say he invented wing-warping lateral control. It seems that is where the Wrights got their ideas for wing warping and not from some inner tube box. For some reason, he chose not to sue the Wrights. The Wrights invention, I think, was the linking of roll control with yaw control, the tail. Without this, banking an aircraft leads to stalling and crashing. I heard somewhere the Wright said, "No, we didn't invent flight...we invented landing!" www.flyingmachines.org/gallau.html
Someday I'm going to have to do a video on the Wright brothers. I think I commented somewhere that their particular genius wasn't necessarily in their ability to invent what they needed, but to take existing technology (including wing-warping) and put it all together. I think that if they'd followed the example of the French aviation pioneers, and been more open, they might have been more successful. As it was, and understandably, they wanted a monopoly and this ended up hurting them.
@@Forgotten_Aviation Many scientists have created new ideas by the process of consolidating the ideas of others, including Einstein. No one works in a vacuum (except possibly astronauts!). I think as you say, their contribution was the putting together several ideas into a right answer. Although they did refine and correct the lift coefficient and physically link the use of a rudder and ailerons plus the perfection of the propeller.
ruclips.net/video/9S7H8TlkBC4/видео.html