Maker

Tim Anderson

The Wright’s engine is excellent — as good as a modern engine in terms of fuel efficiency and power-to-weight ratio. When I say the Wright flyers are bad, I mean they’re dangerous and hard to fly. The Wright brothers made a mistake with their wind tunnel: they set the airspeed over their model wings

PROBLEM to the same scale as that of the model. Due to the nonlinear behavior of fluid flows, they were actually optimizing their wing shape for supersonic flight. All their famous wind-tunnel work ended up producing a wing that is too flat, produces little lift, and is prone to stall. The Wright brothers’ wing is worse, in fact, than what they started with: the bird-wing sections measured by Otto Lilienthal, who built Judging from the quantity of unsolicited larger model wings than the Wrights, so his errors of email I get on this subject, he’s not alone. scale were less significant. I did a little reading, and the causes of the In this example of technology decay, belief in problem include bicycles. It turns out those a flawed scientific theory leads a series of bril-tiny little racing seats crush your pudendal nerve, liant researchers to start with something nearly causing impotence in both men and women. The perfect and create something barely usable. Frank hard-bodies in the spandex with the logos and funny Bethwaite, an Australian planing dinghy wizard, told shoes are sexual cripples with numb crotches. me this proverb: “Model tests are good, and the larger the model, the better they are. Full-scale models are best of all.” In many cases, the disputed scale factors are more significant than actual tunnel test data — one reason many modern airplanes are built and tested full scale, without any tunnel tests at all. Bird-wing sections should be included in the standard catalogs of foil sections. I expect breakthroughs in aerodynamics to come from this ancient, pre-human heirloom technology: the highly evolved shapes of birds’ wings. We are far from understanding them, but we don’t need to fully understand them to use them.

Efi Arazi, the richest Israeli in the world, once said to me, “I’m looking for something to make the old man’s package stand up!”

HEIRLOOM SOLUTION:

Manufacture a bicycle seat with a deep groove down the middle.

There’s one that’s more than 100 years old in the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop, now located at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. The Wright brothers’ airplanes aren’t very good, but their bicycle seats are incredible. This one predates modern research by 100 years, and with a little DayGlo spray paint, it would look great on any modern bicycle. I wonder how many millions of people saw it in the theme park before someone realized what it was for and put copies of it back on the market. It probably had to be reinvented from scratch, at a human cost of thousands of sexually debilitated bicyclists. The problem is serious, hasn’t changed for a hundred years, and this simple, effective solution was once well known. Perhaps no one read what the Wrights and others had to say about this seat, or they were unable to understand it due to changes in the language. This is an example of how easy it can be to lose an heirloom technology, even when conditions seem very favorable for its preservation.

40 Make: Volume 01