Landships II

I understand that some doubt has been expressed about the ability of the flying surfaces on Maxim's amachine to allow the pilot to control it. It was a double bind - the machine had to be very large to lift the engine but this would have meant very large control surfaces which would make it difficult for the pilot to manage

Maxim apparently intended for the machine to be steered by varying power to each propellor, and he anticipated the difficulty of controlling the pitch of the machine by fitting his fore and aft elevators on long arms to obtain greater leverage, whilst rolling was to have been automatically dampened by the noticeable dihedral. Whether or not it would have been a practical aeroplane is hard to say. Such a large machine may have been difficult to control, but on the other hand, might have been less sensitive to adverse gusts and air currents than a smaller lighter craft. But Maxim was very methodical in his work, and far from the 'chauffeur' many writers have made him out to be. No less an authority than Bill Gunston, the aviation writer and a vastly experienced pilot, writes of Maxim in highly respectful tones in 'Giants of the Sky'.

I've always been a big fan of the Maxim machine, such a daring project and (perhaps) so tantalisingly close to success. There's a beautiful large model in the Science Museum in Kensington, I think it was actually built around the time of the real thing, and one of the engines is also displayed there.

Tangentially, in the original serialisation of H G Wells's 'The War of the Worlds' (Pearson's Magazine, 1897), the artist who illustrated it (Warwick Goble) based the Martian flying machine explicitly on Maxim's machine, whilst in an earlier Wells short story, 'The Argonauts of the Air' (1895), his pioneering aviator, Monson, was based on Maxim (though Monson's first flight comes to a sticker end than Maxim's as his machine crashes fatally and spectacularly into the Royal College of Science in London).

that's another great lead Ironsides! And tantalising, for modelling or even building a 1:1 scale. All reminds me very much to Panamarenko, famous Belgian artist, working for decades on all sorts of flying contraptions. Beauty counts, if they ever can fly is just a part of the mystery. See one in a museum and your fingers start to itch.
Sorry for digressing..

-- Edited by kieffer on Tuesday 22nd of March 2011 01:20:03 PM