From Bikes to Flight

Part of the Solutions Series

The bike-to-flight connection involves Alphonse Pénaud

and Sir George Caley;

Pénaud flew his remarkably modern looking Planophore

at the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, France, on August 18, 1871. The Planophore, powered by a rubber band driven pusher propeller, flew 181 feet in 11 seconds. 

Bishop Milton Wright, father of Wilbur and Orville, travelled broadly and kept two libraries that his sons accessed frequently. He brought back to his sons a model of Penaud’s planaphore after traveling to Paris. This introduced to Wilbur and Orville Penaud’s concept of push propellers as well as Penaud’s cruciform tail (which became known generally as "Penaud" tails) as well as his flying models.

Bishop Milton’s travels and readings also introduced  him to the ideas of Sir George Caley. Inspired by watching seabirds at the beach, Caley devised a transmission system whereby the force of gravity acting on weights dropped from his balcony was transmitted to a wheel on which were placed wings. Caley was able to derive from these experiments what he called camber;

the basic principles of aeronautics. From his experiments, Caley was able to determine at what angle the wings placed on a rotating wheel achieved lift. Remarkably, the Wright brothers used the same process with a wheel mounted on bicycle handlebars to determine the angle necessary to cause lift as the bike sped downhill. Next, the dihedral, the relationship of forces acting on the wings and tail sections had to be identified and addressed. Giving inadequate consideration to the relationship between wings and tail had killed several early flight experimenters, including Otto Lilienthal who did not use tails and did not understand the wing-tail relationship; the dihedral.

The Millet Connection 

The Motorcycle Connection to Aircraft

The Millet motorcycle, designed in 1892 by Félix Théodore Millet, had an unusual radial-configuration, a rotary engine incorporated into the rear wheel, believed to be the first one ever used to power a person-carrying vehicle of any type.

In 1887 the engineer Félix Théodore Millet designed  a star-shaped five cylinder petrol engine. At first he adapted his motor in the front wheel of a tricycle. He implemented the motor in the rear wheel of a bicycle, creating the first multicylinder motorcycle.

His invention is particularly inventive because the motor is an integral part of the wheel. The cylinders rotate around a fixed axis of the crankshaft, which is the axis of the wheel. This revolutionary engine was remarkable in every detail at the time.

The connection of bicycles to aircraft is the motorcycle powered by rotary engines, the same engines that were used to power heavier-than-air aircraft. 

The Cross-pollination of ideas

Exposure to the ideas of Pénaud, Caley and Millet was provided by the Paris Exposition of 1889. 

Wikipedia: The Exposition Universelle of 1889(French: [?kspozisj?? yniv??s?l]) was a world's fair held in Paris, France, from 6 May to 31 October 1889. It was the fourth of eight expositions held in the city between 1855 and 1937. It attracted more than thirty-two million visitors. The most famous structure created for the Exposition, and still remaining, is the Eiffel Tower. 

The Liberty Connection

The structure of Bartholdi's sculpture of the Statue of Liberty was designed by Gustav Eiffel who also created the Eiffel Tower,

The coronavirus pandemic has made expositions and trade shows obsolete. Some of the most famous trade shows, like the Detroit Auto Show;

have been cancelled or postponed. Trade shows are derived from fairs and trading centers that have thrived since the bazaars of Samakhand,;

Chang’an, Merv, Mosul, Aleppo and Constantinople, along the Silk Road of Central Asia and the Medieval fairs of Europe. The Medieval fairs also led to the development of correspondent banking with Nostro/Vostro (Your account with us/Our account with you) accounts. Centers of empire were also centers of trade and finance.

Pandemic has redefined commerce and the way we do business and has changed the way goods are exhibited, displayed, marketed and sold. I decided to develop an alternative means of doing this with a multumedia online process.