Today, a very young man teaches us to fly, after
all. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
When I was in grade school,
long ago, I loved building model airplanes powered
by twisted rubber bands. Sometimes I worked from
kits -- sometimes from my own imagination. Building
those models taught me that I had abilities despite
the devastation of undiagnosed dyslexia. They gave
me hope. Now I've learned the poignant history of
those models, and met the man who first built them.
He was Alphonse Penaud, born in 1850 in Paris.
Penaud planned to join the Navy. Then he suffered a
disabling illness. I don't know what -- only that
it ended his plan. So he turned to inventing a
flying machine. He was no idle dreamer. He worked
methodically. He thought through questions of
stability and propulsion.
Penaud was 21 when he finally perfected a
rubber-band-driven model airplane. It had a wing, a
tail, and a propeller in the rear. It was very
close to the models kids like me were building 70
years later. He flew it in the Tuileries Gardens
for all to see.
During the next ten years, Penaud thought and he
experimented. Sometime before 1874, he built a
rubber-band-powered helicopter that he stabilized
with counter-rotating propellers -- one above and
one below.
In 1875, the French Academy of Sciences awarded him
a prize for his brilliant thinking. Still, Penaud
meant to fly, not just to think. He went to work
with a mechanic named Paul Gauchot. In 1876, they
patented a full-scale airplane. For the next four
years, he looked for the means to build and fly the
machine.
Long before, when Penaud was only two, another
French inventor, Henri Giffard, had made the first
successful dirigible flight over Paris. In 1880
Penaud turned to Giffard for support in getting a
heavier-than-air craft built. Giffard gave him a
cold shoulder.
Penaud didn't have the emotional resources to
handle that defeat. He went home and built a small
wooden casket. He put all his designs into it and
delivered it to Giffard's house. Then he went home
and committed suicide. He was only thirty and he
didn't know that Giffard was also depressive --
that, two years later, Giffard would also commit
suicide.
But the fierce intelligence of Penaud's work went
on to touch every would-be airplane builder from
then until we got it right. Read any book on the
history of flight and Penaud is there as a
recurring footnote. In 1874 Bishop Milton Wright
bought one of Penaud's toy helicopters. He took it
home to his boys, Orville and Wilbur. And, right
there, Penaud changed the course of history.
Penaud was a quiet, almost-anonymous force behind
the gathering invention of flight. He was one of
the more important forces, at that. His models
showed inventors what was possible. But they also
showed me what was possible. Long after Penaud
died, his delicate models gave me hope -- just when
I most needed it.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
