The Weird World of Folk Aviators
With his whimsical sculptures, Gregory Bryant celebrates early ideas about winged flight.
- By Rebecca Maksel
- Air & Space magazine, May 2012
Matthew Breitbart, NASM
Shortly after World War II, a Greek laborer named Nicolas Margalis sent the Smithsonian his concept for an interplanetary airplane in a 22-page workbook titled Planes, Planets, Planes. “Apparently what happened is that the workbook moved around, and it finally landed in Mr. Garber's lap. And Mr. Garber wrote Margalis a very nice letter thanking him, and telling him we shall keep your plans on file at the Smithsonian. And that was the end of it." The file sat there from 1947 until 1983 or so, at which point Bryant and his coworker Elizabeth Hand found it in the course of cataloging the Museum's technical files—sorting and photographing every document, newspaper clipping, magazine article, and letter in the collections, a decades' long project. “We just fell in love with Margalis' workbook," Bryant says. "He spends all this time developing this [vehicle] that will fly to all the planets. The scale of it...here we go. It's 630,000 feet across. It's so ambitious. The propeller blades themselves are 300,000 feet, or 60 miles long.'”
Nothing more is known about Margalis. “He could have been a teenager,” says Bryant, “he could have been in his 60s, we don't know.”
Bryant got it in his mind to make the Margalis Planet Plane. “I had to do it from memory because I hadn't seen the book in almost 25 years. And I see I got a great deal of it wrong. I tried to do it to scale; I couldn't, really. The base of it is the map of Greece. That was to get it to scale. If I were to build it to Margalis' scale, it would stand taller than my office.”
Made of cardboard, fingernail polish, colored pencil.
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Comments (2)
Someone should try to build one of these vehicles to see if it actually flies. Some of them really do look as if they could.
Posted by Gray Stanback on June 4,2012 | 06:20 PM
I think I understand what the designers were going for in 10 of 13. (Proto-helicopter)
The mattress thing is probably a deflector to protect the pilot and props from rotor wash and anything its vortex would pull down into them (or pull the vehicle up into) One of the other propellers looks like a pusher or tractor prop, and the other one is probably for steering, since I don't imagine steering the main rotor looks to be an option.
Why I can imagine those features so clearly is either a sign of my total misunderstanding of aerodynamics or a sign of truly deranged thinking. Either way, an amazing set of designs from dreamers.
Posted by Travis Taylor on June 22,2012 | 02:49 PM