Flight before 1900?

Having spent this afternoon googling early attempts at flight and having looked at many insane yet entertaining photos/sketches I wondered if any one of these early attempts had any genuine credibility?

From suicidal gliders (not genuine flight) to crazy Ornithopters and steam powered delusions many early attempts whilst vital to the evolution of eventual flight were indeed doomed to spectacular failure.

With a POD at any point in history can anyone envisage and provide a logical sequence of events that could provide us with an earlier invention of true flight?
 
What about William Samuel Henson? He tried to build a flying machine in the 1840's, but gave up and emigrated to America after he failed. A different alternate history website has a story about what would have happened if he had been successful.
 
What about William Samuel Henson? He tried to build a flying machine in the 1840's, but gave up and emigrated to America after he failed. A different alternate history website has a story about what would have happened if he had been successful.

Thank you for your post. Can you remember the name of this website please?
 
Having spent this afternoon googling early attempts at flight and having looked at many insane yet entertaining photos/sketches I wondered if any one of these early attempts had any genuine credibility?

From suicidal gliders (not genuine flight) to crazy Ornithopters and steam powered delusions many early attempts whilst vital to the evolution of eventual flight were indeed doomed to spectacular failure.

With a POD at any point in history can anyone envisage and provide a logical sequence of events that could provide us with an earlier invention of true flight?

You need a double PoD : an earlier aviation enthusiast studying the mecanism of flight with a scientist eye and a gasoline engine. For example, French General (Corps of Engineers) Resnier de Goué was crazy about flying. He tried several times with orni machines, breaking some legs each time. With a PoD, he could end up as director of the Ecole Polytechnique, creating a whole department of aeronautics and kicking scientific research on flight in the 1800'.
 
An internal combustion engine makes it much easier but isn't necessary. There were several scale model steam powered airplanes that were flown in the decade before the Wright Flyer. The Wright brother's biggest innovation wasn't really the engine but a controllable aircraft. Samuel Langley for example produced several excellent steam powered models, one of which flew over 5,000 ft in 1896, and his miniature flash boiler engine had significantly more power than the Wright brother's gasoline one. The problem is that Langley never figured out how to adequately control the plane in the air.

I think that a first flight anytime after about 1890-95 would be easily possible with only a very minor POD. I could possibly see it done in the 1880's although that would probably be pushing it without a much bigger POD. You'd need to seriously push forward developments of either steam or internal combustion to get it earlier.
 
Changingthetimes.net the category was the 19th century. The title is called slipping the surly bonds of Earth. Their are several chapters, though one of wo't one up. To get to the different categories you click the section on the left called samples, and scroll down to the different categories.
 
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Changingthetimes.net the category was the 19th century. The title is called slipping the surly bonds of Earth. Their are several chapters, though one of wo't one up. To get to the different categories you click the section on the left called samples, and scroll down to the different categories.

Thank you most helpful
 
These are all great answers - earlier controllable flight obviously would have altered the course if human history.

So a follow up question has to be if we have controllable flight twenty years earlier than in Otl by either an American, French or British national how could this alter the course of history. Especially from a militaristic perspective - would you have had RAF spotters during the second boer war for example?
 
Nomis, much like our history I think early aircraft will be limit powered flight to a largely reconnaissance or light fighter role as the power to weight ratio of early engines will be not great. I suspect this period will last longer than our history because of the state of engine development in the 1800's. Aircraft will provide a big incentive to improve light engine performance but it will take a while. The second reason I think aircraft will remain a fairly niche tool at first is that there's unlikely to be WWI equivalent in the late 1800's with say an 1850 POD. Without a prolonged war between the great powers there's not really the incentive to devote the same level of intense development that the first world war caused.

Observation balloons were already used by the 1850's so the use of aerial reconnaissance was already well known and I suspect early airplanes will likely be treated somewhere between those and scouts. Overall though I think that other technical limitation besides flight itself such as engine weight/power and lack of good machine guns will keep airplanes in a scout role for a comparatively long time. I would note that this does perhaps make lighter-than-air craft more militarily viable as they can carry weapon loads too heavy for planes and fly higher while at the same time a lack of aircraft capable machine guns and reliable incendiary rounds significantly increases their survivability.

That doesn't mean to say that aircraft can't have a major impact on world events. Several of the inter-European wars of the late 1800's might have a much different outcome with the improved scouting capability that airplanes provide.
 
Nomis, much like our history I think early aircraft will be limit powered flight to a largely reconnaissance or light fighter role as the power to weight ratio of early engines will be not great. I suspect this period will last longer than our history because of the state of engine development in the 1800's. Aircraft will provide a big incentive to improve light engine performance but it will take a while. The second reason I think aircraft will remain a fairly niche tool at first is that there's unlikely to be WWI equivalent in the late 1800's with say an 1850 POD. Without a prolonged war between the great powers there's not really the incentive to devote the same level of intense development that the first world war caused.

Observation balloons were already used by the 1850's so the use of aerial reconnaissance was already well known and I suspect early airplanes will likely be treated somewhere between those and scouts. Overall though I think that other technical limitation besides flight itself such as engine weight/power and lack of good machine guns will keep airplanes in a scout role for a comparatively long time. I would note that this does perhaps make lighter-than-air craft more militarily viable as they can carry weapon loads too heavy for planes and fly higher while at the same time a lack of aircraft capable machine guns and reliable incendiary rounds significantly increases their survivability.

That doesn't mean to say that aircraft can't have a major impact on world events. Several of the inter-European wars of the late 1800's might have a much different outcome with the improved scouting capability that airplanes provide.[/QUOTE

Ok thanks for this great response. Could we for example see reconnaissance aircraft making an impact in the Franco Prussian war for example? Could it enable a more successful French result? Off the top of my head I cannot remember the exact dates of this conflict but I'm pretty sure it fits neatly into the period in question.
 

Guardian54

Banned
The British Empire could really use a light aircraft, provided it is reliable, for search and rescue (or coordination thereof) in the wilderness, fast mail packets, etc. Canada for example could chart Rupert's Land with it.

...Kind of like how my ASB Canada-wank will be using their gift ship. But less sophisticated due to not having sensor tech from nearly 2000 years later.
 
I used George Cayley in a story I wrote, there was great potential there

And it was Cayley who of course summed up the problem - a light enough engine

I can't remember what I did in that story, but thinking about things now, how heavy were electric engines compared to steam or combustion?
 
I used George Cayley in a story I wrote, there was great potential there

And it was Cayley who of course summed up the problem - a light enough engine

I can't remember what I did in that story, but thinking about things now, how heavy were electric engines compared to steam or combustion?

It's not just the engine, it's the battery. The Electrobat, an electric car from the 1890's had two 1.5 horsepower motors and weighed 1,600 lbs because of the incredible weight of the lead battery. It barely sat two people and had a range of 25 miles. Unfortunately electric aircraft are probably ASB in the 1800's.

I agree with you that the engine power/weight ratio is possibly the biggest obstacle to an airplane before around 1890. At that point the POD is not so much flight as it is the development of engine technology. A conventional steam engine of the day would have been far too heavy and both the flash boiler and internal combustion engine only really hit their stride in power and lightness in the late 1890's.
 
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