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Title: How To Build A 20-Foot Bi-Plane Glider Author: Alfred Powell Morgan Release Date: August 29, 2020 [EBook #63077] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOW TO BUILD A 20-FOOT BI-PLANE GLIDER
This file was produced from page images at the Internet Archive.
This book was transcribed from scans of the original found at the Internet Archive. I have rotated some images. Tables are treated as images. The back of the book contains ads for other books, which I have treated as additional chapters.
_A Practical Handbook on the Construction of a Bi-plane_
_Gliding Machine, Enabling an Intelligent Reader_
_to Make His First Step in the Field of Aviation;_
_Understanding of the Principles Involved._
_Editor Mechanical and Electrical Department of the_
*E. & F. N. SPON, LIMITED, 57 HAYMARKET, S.W.
*Gliding flight is a comparatively new field for the amateur to delve in, but the time has arrived when it is being extensively taken up both as a sport and a means of experiment.
Many very costly aeroplanes have failed to fly because of man’s total inexperience in the art of flying. All of the great aviators now before the world, whose machines are the result of their own genius _learned to fly_ before succeeding in a motor driven machine.
The Wright brothers spent no less than three years on the sand dunes near the coast of North Carolina making gliding flights. They approached the difficulties in a methodical manner, working out each problem and determining which was the best means of accomplishing a certain result.
To control the tendency to pitching, they devised an elevation rudder and attached it to the front of their machine. The next step was to determine whether equilibrium should be maintained by shifting the centre of gravity or if there was not a better method and they introduced what is probably the most valuable feature of the modern aeroplane, namely the warping or twisting of the ends of the planes to secure lateral stability when a gust of wind strikes one end of the machine.