JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2035  

Nothing exceeds like excess, and the excessful is not often successful.  Victor Lougheed saw this in the first decade of powered heavier-than-air flight in a homey and sensible article in Popular Mechanics in 1912.  He had a nice touch in trying to reign-in the impossible stuff that was happening in imagining flight, saying “it is safe to give to fancy only when fact is far away”–and that imagination is perfectly fine, but now that “human flight is a thing accomplished” that the issue of future aircraft should be one of engineering. Thinking big is fine just so long as you have those tools in the box.

Lougheed offers the above illustration as an example of big-and-bad thinking, though he unfortunately does not credit the thinker or the artist.  Too bad–it would have made a nice follow-up.  That said, as a casual reader in early flight I have rarely seen someone taking on what are clear excesses of expectation–Lougheed is an interesting exception. 

He does go on to give an example of possibly-flyable future aircraft and presents the remarkable New Antoinette–a fantastic and prescient design for a plane only nine years removed from the Wrights’ flight, a streamlined monoplane that seems to come from reasonable future, which it sort-of does.  This plane evidently was too heavy for the 100-h.p.engine, but the engineering was at least definitely “there”.

The Antoinette:

Here’s a very long and very illustrated thumbnail site for French pre-WWI aircraft: http://flyingmachines.ru/Site2/Arts/Art4743.htm