There’s an interesting article in the current issue of the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Magazine on the design of First World War aircraft. The gist of it is that while huge advances in aircraft design took place between 1914 and 1918 lots of good ideas took a long time to be adopted and lots of bad ideas persisted much longer than they should have done.
Most of the improvements emerged from trial and error. But what if designers during the first World War had had the tools for simulation and analysis that are available today? Many of the errors would have been avoided had the firms of Fokker, Sopwith, Nieuport, and the rest had a few desktop computers.
The question is asked tongue-in-cheek, of course, but the article does take a rather teleological approach. The history of technology offers very few cases of straightforward development towards the best solution for whatever problem is being addressed; the process of technological change tends to be a lot more complex, indirect and contingent than that, and technical issues are never the only ones at stake: social, political, financial and cultural factors all play a part, and can end up being more important than the simple question (if it is simple) of what is ‘the best technology’. Heavier-than-air craft of military value only dated from about 1910; the whole area of military aviation was new and largely unknown; the pressure of war forced improvisation as much as it did innovation; engineering at the time was as much an intuitive pursuit as it was a technical discipline, particularly in aviation where gifted amateurism was the order of the day; and the luxury of hindsight was - of course - not available at the time. What is surprising is not that Great War aircraft were not better than they were, but that they were as good as they turned out to be.
The issue of interrupter gear is raised at one point - i.e. a system that meant you could fire a machine gun forward along the axis of the aircraft without shooting your propellor off. Its invention is ascribed to Anthony Fokker, and the author wonders about ‘the inability of the British and French, who could build both engines and machine guns, to quickly contrive a satisfactory way to synchronize them’. My understanding was (and I haven’t time to check this with a reliable source right now) that it was the French pilot Roland Garros who invented the first effective interrupter system, which he fitted to his own aircraft, and that it was when he was shot down that the Germans found the secret, improved upon it, and fitted it to the Fokker Eindecker, with devastating results.
Peter Garrison, ‘What the Red Baron never knew’, Air & Space Magazine, February 2008.
