successful inventor of the commercial airship (Pagano, 2012).
The next contents of the talk between Santos-Dumont and Thomas Edison were extracted from a newspaper report available at Pagano’s blog (Pagano, 2012).
Edison was much interested in the young man who had wondered Paris and the world by steering an airship over the city, not once but several times: “You are the only man who has done such a thing,” he exclaimed. “I am sure you have never worked on the problem of aerial navigation,” replied Santos-Dumont, “or you would have accomplished years ago more than I have done now.” The aeronaut was not trying to be complimentary; he had the biggest admiration for Thomas Edison and his inventive genius. At this point, Edison affirmed that he had built a very light motor to be operated by exploding gunpowder. He experienced a lot in lifting weights with it, but worked with a small model and did not attempt to fly. The man also stated that he gave it all up because had a number of other things to do which were far more profitable. Like the Wright brothers, Edison was caught by the spirit of the English Revolution.
The talk continued and Edison addressed that the aircraft would become even lighter than those already developed by Dumont. Mr. Edison believed that the problem of aerial navigation should be solved by means of the flying machine, and not by the airship. Only with the machine can air navigation ever be made either safe or commercially profitable, he said during the conversation. The term flying machine referred to a contrivance heavier than the air, it is intended to navigate. At rest such an apparatus would not float at all, due to the higher speed at which it moves. In Edison’s mind, then, aerial navigation was simply a question of sufficient power, properly applied, to overcome the lack of buoyancy necessary to make the machine rise and to keep it in sufficient motion in order to hold it in position at a certain altitude. He constantly referred to the figure of the bird that anyone could see rise and fly at will.
At a certain point, someone asked Mr. Edison whether his new storage battery would be useful in solving the problem of aerial navigation. “Oh, no, of course not,” he replied. “It would be too heavy. We must get the lightest possible motive power. Thus, the greatest factor of this problem is to get a very light motor, which will be powerful enough to operate the flying machine properly.” The inventor believed that the gasoline or gunpowder engines were the best suited for the task. He affirmed that Santos-Dumont was on the right track in this regard, but he should tum his efforts towards a flying machine not airships. Afterwards, Santos-Dumont asked Mr. Edison to join the race to develop a proper flying machine and Edison replied: “No, I will not go into anything which cannot be protected from the pirates who live off the work of inventions, and I do not believe it would be possible to secure a patent on other flying machine or an airship or any part of one that would stand the test of the courts. If someone should make a commercially successful flying machine, dozens would at once copy the models and take away the fruits of the original inventor’s labor. There is not a judge in the country who would holds that there was really any invention in such an apparatus, because so much has been done and written about it that the only difference between the successful machine, which have been, will be very alight. I doubt whether any new principle will be discovered on which even a claim for a patent may be made.”
The aviator believed that there was no big barrier to overcome the issue of building a successful flying machine. According to him, light and compact structures as well as powerful engines enough to sustain flight would be easily available in a near future. The successful test with unmanned flying machines carried out by Samuel Langley was also addressed by him and he manifested again his disregard for airships for solving the problem of aerial navigation.
During the first years of the 20th century, Santos-Dumont was the single person in the world who was able to fly in a controlled fashion. Emmanuel Aimé, who was present in such meeting, once declared (Musa et al., 2001): “Among all airship designs, openly or secretly studied in the last few years, the one by Santos-Dumont is the only one capable of flying in the free atmosphere. Say what you may, but there are no airships in the world, there is only one and you have to come to Paris in order to see it.”
Since a long time, experimental development in Fluid Mechanics was performed side-by-side with theoretical work carried out by scientists and researchers. In 1738, Daniel Bernoulli published his findings on the relationship between pressure and gas velocity. His assistant, Leonard Euler, published some articles in 1750 with his famous equations on the behavior of compressible fluids. Italian mathematician Joseph Lagrange and French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace studied Euler’s findings and tried to solve his equations. In 1788, Lagrange introduced a new model for fluid flow, as well as new equations for calculating speed and pressure.
J. Aerosp. Technol. Manag., Sao José dos Campos, Vol.4, No 3, pp. 355-379, Jul.-Sep., 2012
