JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Here’s another early aviation post, as I seem to be a little stuck this morning in the 1908-1911 period…or suitably enough down a small rabbit hole to keep me from doing my mailing duties.  This is a fascinating period with tremendous steps forward in technology taking place just five years after the first successful Wright powered flight test–it is hard to imagine the Wrights were roundly ridiculed in their efforts and worked for the most part in deep privacy; and yet here, just 1500 days or so later, there are hundreds of aeronauts and a dozen or so journals devoted to tech aspects of flight.

What caught my Star Trekian eye here in this May 1908 article in l’Aerophile was the lovely found-abstract plans for supporting the envelope of Louis Capazza’s lenticular airship, a composite balloon/aircraft. The firm of Adolphe Bayard-Clement was the planned producer of the airship (they were the first to go into general production of an airplane, the Santos-Dumont Demoiselle 19) though it never was built. It was certainly intriguing–it was lighter than air, non-symmetrical, top be powered by three 120 hp engines supplying power to three screws fore and aft–it was lovely in its way, and of course given it plan and profile immediately suggests to me the Starship Enterprise, though I may be alone in that.  

And here’s the Found-Abstract art end of the deal–the structure for the non-symmetrical support for the balloon/plane envelope:

Tech info (and image source, above) see Berget, Conquest of the Air, 1909, pp 183-186. 

Images sources (below):  https://archive.org/details/larophile16besa/page/182