The Wright motor for the job - WAS: 13 horsepower

wright1902glider wrote:

Now for Richard's question:
According to the Wright notebooks published by McFarland, the machine
weighed 605 lbs. I do not know if that number included any water in
the block or the blubber tubes or if it included the fuel either.
Orville reportedly weighed in at 163 lbs, Wlibur was 146 lbs.
The main wings were 40' 4" x 6' 6" or according to the notes, 510 sq.
ft.
The all-flying canards totaled 48 sq. ft
Take-off hp has recently been estimated at 8.83 hp
headwind was 28-34 mph
ground speed was 6-7 mph

There are volumes of technical calculations in the notebooks between
late 1901 and 1903 describing both the 1902 and 1903 flying machines.
The best way to analize (sp?) the performance of the machines would be
to read "The Papers of Wilbur & Orville Wright" edited by Prof. Marvin
McFarland, Librarian of Congress, c. 1953. This work is a verbatium
compilation of the Wrights letters and notebooks as received from
Orville Wright by the Library of Congress. Having seen the original
"Notebook C" (1902-1903) and two of the letters on display in 2003, I
can tell you that the corresponding pages in McFarland are word-for-
word.

You may also want to search for the technical results of The Wright
Experience's wind tunnel testing of the 1903 machine, conducted at VA
Tech. in 2002 (I think). Funding from FORD (yep, that Ford), and Harry
Combs resulted in a few million for those experiments.

I would like to see your numbers when you compile them. Some day I too
will have time to recreate the 1901 bicycle tests. I have the bike
aparatus and the wallpaper scraps. Now all I need is the time and a
basic understanding of the mathmatics.

Harry

Do you know if that book by McFarland is still in print. I'd love to
read it for the history if nothing else I could learn from it.

Tony