An Old Book of Aeroplanes

Today, an old book with an unintended message.  The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. 

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     The title is “Aircraft of the 1914-1918 War.”  And those few years yielded so many flying machines.  The book offers fine descriptions of German, English, and French airplanes.  (America had yet to become much of an airplane maker.) 

The war began just eleven years after our Wright Brothers flew.  So the airplanes of 1914 are all primitive. Speeds were like those of our cars on freeways.  Streamlining wasn’t yet a priority.  And we’d just entered a time when the normal pattern of invention and development would be disrupted.

The urgency of war meant we had to spot weaknesses, then quickly eliminate them.  Example: The earliest British and French airplanes had skids reaching out in front and curling upward.  They were to keep airplanes from tipping over when they landed.  It was soon clear that was just extra weight and drag.  A feature that the Germans, who’d begun flying later, had never used in the first place.

The British BE-2 biplane with front skids

Now, I thumb through this collection of aircraft and see so many other features tried out and then either incorporated or quickly dropped.  Take the number of wings.  Most French pioneers had flown single-wing airplanes.  And that’s what the French and Germans both built early in the war.  Then they quickly shifted to biplanes.  The British? Well, they went directly to biplanes.

Biplanes concentrated lift in a smaller space.  That made them more maneuverable.  So why not three wings?  Both the British and Germans experimented with three wings.  Then they dropped the idea because those airplanes were too tricky to fly.  (If you’re thinking about von Richthofen’s red triplane, forget it.  He used it only near the end.  Then he died in one.)

And what about engines?  Well, we see Germany leaning toward liquid-cooling.  And the Allies?  They liked air-cooled engines.  Liquid-cooled engines offered less drag, but they needed an air-cooled radiator.  So my book shows all kinds of awkward radiator placements.  (Like right over the pilot’s head in the upper wing!)

German 1916 Albatros D-II with coolant radiator above pilot’s head

Thumbing through pages, we see one compromise after another.  Try this – and if this doesn’t work, then dump it and try that.  That’s what becomes of technology in wartime.  New inventions need to be nursed and perfected.  The urgency of war means we must just spot the problem and fix it.  A dazzling variety of such fixes emerges from this collection of airplanes.

An array of British WW-I aircraft

History shows us that airplane evolution really took off in the 1920s, after the war.  Then we found inventors working with less desperation and more focus on their desired outcomes.  So my lovely old book reminds us that the old maxim, “Necessity is the Mother of Invention” is much more a wish, than it is how things really work.

I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.

(Theme music)

O.G. Thetford, E.J. Riding, Aircraft of the 1914-1918 War. Harleyford Publications. 1954

For more on the rate of improvement technology during wartime, see J. H. Lienhard, How Invention Begins, Oxford Univ. Press, 2006, Chapter 8.

An Engines episode about “The Mother of Invention”

Another episode about “Cooled by Air or Water” engines in WW-I.

Wikipedia article on engine cooling.

Wikipedia also provides articles on monoplanes, biplanes, and triplanes.   

All black and white images are from the Thetford-Riding source.  The 1916 Albatros is my photo.

The Fokker D-VII.  Germany’s best fighter airplane of the war

This Episode first aired on July 27, 2026.