The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed

by John McPhee

  Olcott opened the hatch. “There just isn’t any more up stick!” he shouted. There was no point in trying anymore. As he taxied to the hangar, the station wagons were lined up funereally behind him.

  Linkenhoker said, “I feel like five pounds of manure in a two-pound bag, that’s what I feel like.” He drove past the waddling gulls, and skirted them this time, and said, “I think we’ve got a very sick bird out here somewhere.”

  In the cafeteria, Olcott ordered doughnuts and smiled gamely when he was reminded that he was still flying in the English muffins. The group—Weber in a T-shirt, Miller in his flight jacket, others in sports shirts, Olcott in a charcoal-gray suit—sat at white Formica tables and reviewed their problem. Outside the windows, ponderous Starlifters from McGuire Air Force Base—seventy-ton aircraft, wings drooping—made touch-and-go runs where the 26 had been struggling half an hour before in its attempt to make the Starlifters obsolete.

  “We need at least forty-one hundred r.p.m., and we’re just not getting it,” Olcott said.

  “It sounds as if it’s peaking out,” said Weber. “We can strobe that prop. The tachometer might be off.”

  Linkenhoker said, “There is definitely a malfunctioning in that tachometer.”

  Olcott bit into a doughnut. He spilled some confectioners’ sugar on his blue fleurs-de-lis tie. He brushed the sugar away. “Fix tachometer,” he said. He wrote, as he spoke, in a neat hand on lined paper—a list of things to do before there could be another outing. He looked up. “The engine is not putting out,” he said. “There is something wrong with it, or the prop is at the wrong pitch. We need an engine fix or a control fix before we go out again. We need to explore a farther-aft c.g. It could be that this prop is just a little bit too high-pitched. The previous prop was underpitched. We may need a prop in the middle somewhere to give a little more power to get through ground effect.”

  “There is no strobe here at NAFEC,” Miller said.

  Weber looked at him in disbelief. “They don’t have a strobe in a place like this?”

  “O.K. Borrow one from Princeton, bring it down here, strobe the prop, and calibrate the tachometer,” Olcott said, with discernible impatience. “We’ve got to move forward. A couple more outings like today’s and the word is going to get around: ‘Hey, they can’t get out of ground effect.’”

  Miller looked uneasily around the cafeteria. Charlie Mills, who was picking the right moment, made a characteristic suggestion that one more try be made, going for broke. He pointed out that the 26 was behaving like any overloaded aircraft, that a plane operating above its maximum gross would typically lift off in the way the 26 had and then fail to get out of ground effect. The 26 had a backpack parachute in it, fitted to the seat. How much did the parachute weigh? Twenty pounds. Cigarette smoke was billowing out of Mills’ mouth. What the hell good was a parachute six feet off the ground? Olcott was more than willing to do without it. Take half the fuel out, Mills further suggested. Thirty pounds. The radio? Seven pounds. Hydraulic lines? One pound. The fire extinguisher? A pound and a half. The group agreed to throw out a hundred pounds in alt—just to try to prove that the 26 could get out of ground effect. Let other problems take care of themselves later on. The debriefing ended. Miller, shoving his chair back, said, “This is very reminiscent of Aereon 7, this whole experience.”

  It was September 28th, two weeks later, before all the items on Olcott’s list had been checked off and the weather forecast seemed good enough for the seventh test outing of the 26. It was called for dawn, September 29th. I rode down to NAFEC with Miller, and poured out coffee by the map light in his Mercedes. We looked up and saw leaden clouds forming islands in the stars. We thought the weather forecast might have been wrong. Miller drove alarmingly—a little more so than usual, making decisions somewhat more slowly than the speed seemed to require. He was in a brooding mood. “No amount of hope will fly a stone,” he said. “I could not have lasted through this ordeal if I were not a Christian.”

  The sky above NAFEC was clear by dawn. The clouds had all moved over to one side and were trying to stuff themselves into the horizon. The sun lifted behind them. People deployed. The crash equipment ran around as usual, costing Aereon twenty-three dollars and fifty cents an hour. The air was cool, compact, almost cold. A light, steady wind was blowing from the north. Olcott made two or three low flights that were disappointingly like the earlier ones, but he was just loosening up, getting the vehicle around him again, getting his memories into line. Then he made his move, for something or nothing. The 26 had gone only nine hundred and twenty feet down the runway when, with a slight wobble, a wheel at a time, it jumped into the air. It was doing fifty knots. It climbed. Its wheels, seen from Linkenhoker’s car, which was running along the taxiway, for the first time ever cleared the pines on the horizon and were in silhouette against the sky. The 26 climbed more—completely out of ground effect—and Olcott established a steady state of flight. He was flying at fifty-nine knots—fifty feet in the air. Linkenhoker’s almost rigid taciturnity broke down. He slapped Weber on the arm. “How does that grab you?” he said.

  Putman said, “If he goes any higher, we’ll have to pressurize him.”

  Olcott began to indulge in considerable aileron activity—roll excursions, roll excitation. “He’s getting the feel of it,” Weber said. “I think he may have been a little nervous, but he seems completely at ease with the airplane.”

  “The aerobody.”

  “Yeah.”

  Olcott reduced power, and the 26 found its way down to the runway.

  Putman said, “If someone were to ask me, I’d say that was the first flight of the Aereon.”

  Charlie Mills was all smoke and smiles. He reminded everyone, “As I said before—out the parachute, out the radio, change the c.g., and the mother will go.”

  The sum of what had been learned was that the 26 would fly when out of ground effect. The debriefing might have been called “the deflating.” The ship had gone fifty feet into the air but was so underpowered that it was not going anywhere else. “That prop is a club,” Putman said. No wonder Bensen set no fires with it. A new prop would have to be carved. Where would you turn, in the present age of aviation, if you wanted a custom-designed, customcarved wooden propeller? Well, there was a man in Texas, another near Denver; but in all likelihood, in such a situation, you would talk to Henry Rose, in Lititz, Pennsylvania. Had anyone talked to Henry Rose? Yes. A new prop would cost five hundred dollars, would take at least four weeks in the making, and should increase the aircraft’s power by thirty-five per cent.

  Hundreds of bits of black woollen yarn, each four inches long, Scotch-taped to the 26 by Linkenhoker, had shown the presence of another problem. Air moving over and under the aerobody was not buttoning itself up properly when it came together again. Increased drag was the result. Vortex generators—small metal plates poking into the airstream—would correct the difficulty. They would have to be made, and welded to the fuselage. The list grew.

  Miller listened in mounting gloom. He knew the cost of a month or two of down time. He knew that the 26 was flying headlong into the red, and, on principle, he would let the program move forward only on invested money, not on borrowed money. Months might well pass (nearly six months did pass) before the 26 flew again.

  “The rudders are nice,” Olcott said, concluding the debriefing. “The roll damping is weak, but right now there is nothing in the stability and control points that would prevent us from making a circuit of the field.” A Starlifter touched down on the runway, making puffs of rubbersmoke, and picked up again into the air. “I’d say today was a very successful outing,” Olcott said quietly. “As someone in here said, we got out of the English muffins and into the Danish pastry.”

  THE FRONT PAGE of the New York Herald of September 8, 1863, was entirely given over to classified ads and a large map of Chattanooga depicting the military situation there.

  WANTED IMMEDIATELY—A FEW FIREMEN, coal passers, landsmen and g
reen hands; also two colored men for a steamer going on the blockade; ship for one year $12.50 a month and $54 advanced. F. Gallagher, 174 South Street.

  NOTICE TO DRAFTED MEN! Any man drafted into the service of the United States, desirous of obtaining a substitute, can do so upon very moderate terms by applying to Henry Lindensruth, 108 Greenwich Street, N.Y.

  A RESPECTABLE YOUNG GIRL wishes a situation as a stewardess in a steamer to California. Call at her residence, 144 West 32d st.

  Page 2 was almost all Chattanooga: “The Rebel Army Probably Outflanked—Bragg’s Old Army Deteriorating—Ten Thousand Deserters Reported Within Our Lines.”

  On page 3, things began to happen all over.

  CHARLESTON—The Siege—Engagement Between the Iron Clads and Forts Wagner and Moultrie …

  FEARFUL MASSACRE BY INDIANS—A special dispatch from St. Paul, Minnesota, says news has been received that a flatboat coming down the Missouri River was attacked by Indians, and all on board, twenty-five in number, were killed … .

  IMPORTANT FROM THE SOUTHWEST—Generals Grant and Thomas have gone to New Orleans. General Grant will command all the Mississippi region … .

  IMPORTANT FROM JAPAN—Anglo-American War on the Japanese—The United States Gunboat Wyoming Destroys the Japanese Steamer Sarsfield and Silences the Forts at Kanagawa … .

  MEADE’S ARMY—A grand review of the Third Corps by General Meade takes place today. General Sickles is expected to be present … .

  AERIAL NAVIGATION—We have this week the pleasure to record the success of the most extraordinary invention of the age, if not the most so of any the world ever saw—at least the greatest stride in invention ever made by a single individual … .

  The mayor of Perth Amboy had built and flown a dirigible airship. With Herald reporters present, Solomon Andrews had flown his airship up and away from Perth Amboy common, and had “demonstrated to an admiring crowd the possibility of going against the wind and of guiding her in any and every direction.”

  This was twenty-one years before Renard and Krebs flew their electric airship La France, thirty-eight years before Alberto Santos-Dumont flew his No. 6 around the Eiffel Tower, and forty years before the brothers Lebaudy made their twenty-eight closed-circuit trips in Lebaudy I —milestones in the acknowledged beginnings of dirigible lighter-than-air flight. Andrews’ airship, which was powered by gravity, consisted primarily of three cylindroid hulls, each eighty feet long, sewn together at their longitudinal equators and covered with varnished linen. The inventor, as pilot, stood in a gondola that hung on cords sixteen feet below the triple hull. From the federal government he had received a patent, and he had also been given a charter to establish the world’s first airline—the Aerial Navigation Company, New York to Philadelphia and back. When he made his first airship, he decided that it represented the beginning of a new age of man, so, inventing a word, he named it Aereon.

  Andrews was tall, with flowing blond hair, a Grecian profile. His stance was nonchalant. The Phi Beta Kappa key tapped against a flat stomach. He was a medical doctor, trained at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, which was then on Barclay Street, in lower Manhattan. He had gone to Yale. His father, Joseph Andrews, was the minister of the First Presbyterian Church of Perth Amboy. One Sunday when Solomon Andrews was seventeen, he looked out a church window during his father’s sermon and became absorbed by the flight of a bald eagle, which was moving through the air without stirring its wings. He felt, he said later, that the simple secret of flight had been shown to him at that moment, and he resolved to place among his numerous ambitions in life the construction of a device that would imitate the eagle. His ambitions and interests were, as they developed, gallimaufric. He invented, among other things, the combination lock. To advertise it, he locked up a thousand dollars in a small trunk, took it to Wall Street, and offered to give the money to anyone who could pick the lock. The offer lasted two months, and no one picked the lock. He invented the wickless oil lamp. He invented a kitchen range for anthracite. As mayor, and also president of the board of health, he designed and built the Perth Amboy sewer. In barracks constructed by the English Army in the eighteenth century he established workrooms for the manufacture of his inventions, which also included a fumigator, a forging press, a velocipede, a machine to crack nuts. He developed an automated barrelmaker that could turn out five hundred kegs a day. For thirty years, under government contract, he made the locks—key locks—for United States mailbags. The fortune he assembled from all these inventions he poured into the development of his airship. The fortune, though, was not enough. He hunted constantly for investors.

  After observing first hand the awkward attempt of the Union Army to use balloons for aerial reconnaissance, Andrews wrote to President Lincoln, asked for support in the construction of Aereons, pledged fifty thousand dollars’ worth of his own real estate to show that he was in earnest, and guaranteed “to sail five or ten miles into Secessia and back, or no pay.” The White House referred the letter to the War Department, which referred it to a pigeonhole. Andrews persisted. Eyewitnesses of the early flights wrote to Washington. Eventually, a commission was set up to look into the Aereon’s potentialities. Andrews went to Washington with hydrogen-filled India-rubber models, which flew around a room and returned to his hand. The commission recommended “a suitable appropriation” for the development of Aereons; but then the war ended, the President was assassinated, and the government forgot Andrews and his airship.

  Andrews found enough investors to sustain him at least for a time, and he went ahead on his own. Reviewing and refining his theory of dirigible flight, he decided that the triple hull was not the optimum configuration after all. He would prefer, now, a tremendous lemon seed—a cylindroid Aereon, somewhat stubby, pointed at either end. Probably because he wanted to attract more attention than he had attracted before, he built this second airship in a vacant lot on the southeast corner of Greene and Houston Streets, in New York. To explain how his Aereons flew, he published a pamphlet called The Art of Flying, subtitled Without Eccentricity There Is No Progression. The nucleus of his conception was simple. A plank rising through water goes sideways, following the line of least resistance. A balloon with an elongated axis would also move sideways, like the plank, following the line of least resistance. It would move rapidly—it would have to move rapidly—because gravitation ignores lateral motion. For example, if a spherical balloon and an elongated balloon of the same displacement were released simultaneously, each would attain an altitude of, say, a thousand feet at the same moment. The spherical balloon, though, would rise slowly and vertically, while the elongated balloon would shoot off sideways at a handsome clip, up an inclined plane. Andrews had found that speed was related to displacement. He could achieve lateral motion of about one mile per hour for every pound that his ship was lighter than air. Thirty pounds: thirty miles per hour. Throw ten pounds overboard at the start: fly off at ten miles per hour. At a selected altitude, valve gas—that is, get rid of gas (he used hydrogen)-and descend, heavier than air, down an inclined plane. Andrews tilted the airship’s nose upward by stepping to the rear of the gondola and downward by stepping toward the front. His angle-of-attack indicator consisted of three marbles in calibrated wooden grooves. When the first marble moved in its groove, the airship was inclined five degrees. When the second marble moved, the ship was inclined ten degrees. Third marble, fifteen degrees. He steered with a triangular rudder that was covered with cambric muslin. To rise again, throw off more ballast (he used sand). Valve gas to descend. Rise, descend, rise, descend-always in broad synclinal parabolas. When hydrogen and ballast run low, stop at a depot for more gas, more ballast. Dirigible flight, no engine—that was the art of flying.

  The New York World was impressed. It reviewed Andrews’ flying career under a deep stack of headlines on June 24, 1865:

  AERIAL

  A PLAN FOR UTILIZING

  THE ATMOSPHERIC OCEAN

  THE AIR MADE NAVIGABLE

 
A SUCCESSFUL VOYAGE

  IN THE BLUE EMPYREAN

  MARVELOUS PERFORMANCES

  AT PERTH AMBOY

  A FLYING JERSEYMAN

  ABOVE THE CLOUDS

  BOREAS DEFIED

  BY THE AEREON

  &C &C &C

  “There is no immortality for Montgolfier, Godard, or Nadar,” the article began. “A gentleman from New Jersey has mastered the theory of interplanetary navigation … . By his aid we shall be able to bridge the rainbows and go picnicking at the height of Mont Blanc. His invention is the culminating endeavor of the history of aerostation.”

  Andrews had said to the World reporter, “When the whole thing becomes known to the public, I expect to lose credit for ingenuity because of its simplicity. But I mean to entitle myself to credit for faith and perseverance. When Kepler announced his great laws of the planetary system, he said, ‘I can well wait a century for a reader, since God has waited six thousand years for an observer.’ So may I well afford to wait God’s time, as I have done, for the development of aerial navigation, since He has honored me as its inventor or discoverer.”