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
Eric Long, NASM
For this Aerial Cabin, Bryant had nothing more to go on than a single illustrated reference in a Russian-language book. "The book offered little information," he says, "except to note its 1876 appearance in the Letters to the Editor section of Scientific American from a Mr. Lemka. “That's one I like in particular,” says Bryant, “because it's so unaerodynamic. The rigging does not make a lot of sense. I know that the rigging is supposed to go through the wheel, but to what purpose is impossible to say, because it is tied down on both ends. The inventor planned it to fly at the rate of 60 miles an hour.
Bryant says the Aerial Cabin is as faithful to Lemka's drawing as he could make it. "It's not like this person was just idly daydreaming, he says. "To come up with the logic of the sails and wings—this is the work of several days or weeks or months."
Made of cardboard, paper, toothpicks, plastic (for the windows), cooking skewers, tempera paint.
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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