Posted on 12/17/2019 12:40:01 AM PST by Swordmaker
But the technology wasn’t quite ready for Robert E. Lee’s air cavalry
It’s the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 and Union forces on Cemetery Ridge await the final Confederate assault. But instead of witnessing serried ranks of rebels marching across a mile of open ground into the maws of Yankee cannons, the bluecoat regiments are shocked to hear the thud of rotor blades.
It is the the sound of Confederate general George Pickett’s 13,000-strong division landing behind Union lines.
Is this a neo-Confederate dream? The Red Badge of Courage meets Apocalypse Now?
No, it turns out that a Confederate engineer actually did design a helicopter back in 1862.
William C. Powers was an architectural engineer in Mobile, Alabama. Frustrated by the Union blockade of Mobile and other Southern ports, which prevented the Confederacy from exporting cotton and importing weapons, Powers resolved to devise a way to destroy Union ships.
(Excerpt) Read more at warisboring.com ...
Apparently drawing a picture and building a toy model counts as “almost developed”.
It works for Iran. Well, until someone shoots back...
Guy could have saved himself a lot of trouble if he first put pen to paper and did some rudimentary power to weight calculations.
It looks like early flying machine inventors thought that the same processes that move vehicles through water would work to move vehicles through air. That highlights just how inventive the Wright brothers were when they came up with a fixed wing craft. Yes, they had contemporaries with similar ideas, but they were first to make it work.
Weight matters.
I was thinking he could have combined it with a balloon to be able to give the balloon some steering. But with a steam engine - that would be some balloon. I wonder when the first modern style airplane propeller was invented? Combine it with a bicycle pedal power and a balloon might be enough for steering?
Okay - here’s what I found on the net:
“In 1852, Jules Henri Giffard invented the first full-size powered airship, which used a three-bladed propeller paired with a 3-horsepower steam engine. And in 1873, aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont built steerable aluminum airships powered by large wooden propellers.”
The confederates might not have been successful with a helicopter, but they did make a missile. If memory serves me, the confederate missile used alcohol for fuel, was launched at Washington, but impacted in a vacant lot on the city outskirts after a 15 or 20 mile flight. Additionally, the explosives failed to detonate.
If only….
The Confederates were unable to build a single locomotive during the Civil War.
How would they have been able to build that contraption.
An artist can ‘conceptualize’ something new, but it takes engineers and testing to design and perfect new technology. Da Vinci’s famous notebooks are filled with all kinds of sketches. Jules Verne came up with the essentials of a nuclear submarine. But it took the Wright Brothers and some pretty thorough testing (wind tunnels, kite-versions) to do the spade work to make heavier-than-air flight a reality. And even they couldn’t have done it before gasoline-powered internal combustion engines had arrived (and they had only JUST arrived).
There was no way in Hell that a helicopter was going to be “almost” invented until a powerful, relatively light weight motor was invented.
“It looks like early flying machine inventors thought that the same processes that move vehicles through water would work to move vehicles through air.”
That’s what I was thinking.
Hell of a post hole digger. Four different augers to choose from.
Perhaps we should build a large wooden badger...
What if Spartacus had a Piper Cub?
I wish Cotton was a monkey
“I wish Cotton was a monkey”
Be careful, are you wearing cotton?
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