A very nice guy once emailed me a while back, seeing my name in achtungpanzer.com’s guest book. I used the name “HortenFlyingWing” and he asked me to proofread an article about it. I learned some things from him, he learned some from me. He sent me many of his articles to proof read, and he later told me that he hoped that one day one of these articles would be published in a world war 2 magazine. I edited some of his articles, and recieved some more. This is for you, whereever you are right now. This forum might not be a magazine, but A&A.org is a start.
Now, enjoy one of his many articles:
don’t mind mis-spellings, and some errors here and there. the following article isn’t proofread.
German Innovations in Engineering
I’ve always had a fascination with the history of machines, and especially that moment when someone thinks of something completely new, or figures out a much better design for something.
In the course of my casual readings, I would make a mental note of the milestones in mechanical design that interested me, and after a while I began to notice an unusually large percentage of them were from Germans.
I have not found a definitive explanation for this phenomenon, but the answer may have something to do with the class systems in Britain and the U.S. during the late 19th century. At that time, any family that could afford to send their child to a university was grooming them to take over the family business, or perhaps ascend to some government position of influence. If the family was wealthy enough that the child would never need to work, a liberal arts education would prepare them for conversing in high society. If the individual insisted on being useful, the law, or the medical field were fine, but in no way was becoming an engineer acceptable. This is a stark contrast to Germany, where from the very beginnings of the industrial revolution, engineering was respected, and government sponsored universities were built, which made higher education in practical fields available to any young student showing promise.
I believe this German innovation also served as an example for the U.S. as after WWII the primary benefit of the G.I. bill was making a college education available to any returning military personnel. As a result, state-run universities multiplied and overtook the expensive private schools, and over time the increase in higher education amongst the general population has benefited the U.S. immeasurably.
Below is an index of the accompanying paragraphs, which are a compilation of those German innovations that may be of some interest.
- WWII stealth bomber
- WWII atomic bomb
- Guided bombs and missiles
- WWII “Elektroboat” submarines
- The AK-47’s German roots
- Infrared night vision
- The German roots of the Wright bros. first airplane
- The first automobile
- Recording tape
- 1934 Auto-Union race car
- Advanced German aircraft research from the end of WWII
The WWII Stealth Bomber
In the last days of WWII a German aircraft factory completed 3 stealth bombers just as the American army captured it, preventing the planes from ever being used by the war effort. They were photographed, dismantled, and shipped to the Wright-Patterson air force base in Ohio. The designer was Reimar Horton.
After WW I, Germany was not permitted to have any aircraft factories, but gliders were allowed. Aircraft fascinated Horton, so he studied the principles of aeronautic design. In a conventional craft, there is a main wing to create lift, and a fuselage to hold cargo and also to connect the wing to some type of stabilizer at the rear. Horton realized if he could learn to control a wing by itself, he could eliminate the tail and fuselage, which add drag without adding any lift. After years of calculation and experimentation, he achieved great success. Efficiency is important in any aircraft, but with an un-powered glider, it is crucial.
In 1937 one of his record-setting gliders was featured on the front page of the New York Times, showing that controlling a flying wing was possible. Two months later the U.S. army commissioned Northrop to design a powered flying wing for them, as it was obvious the craft would be invisible to radar. The U.S. was drawn into the war in 1941, and Northrop had not yet worked out the controllability problems of a flying wing. It was assumed that the war would be over soon, as it had in 1918, when the U.S. was pulled into WW I, so the project was considered low priority, as they thought it wouldn’t be finished in time.
When Hitler started WWII in 1939, he achieved such stunning successes in Poland and France, he made one of his worst misjudgments; he ordered a halt on all advanced research in order to put all of Germanys resources into conventional weapons. Horton was working as an aircraft engineer, and was allowed to do some work on a propeller-driven flying wing, but it too was considered low priority in relation to his other duties. The Me-262 was the first jet –powered aircraft, and when it went into production in 1943, Horton was ordered to develop a prototype one-seat flying-wing bomber using two of the new Jumo (Jumo 004b) jet engines. It was required to be capable of flying from Germany to the American bases in England, and although the bomb-bay was small, it has only been recently that the U.S. has revealed how close the Germans came to having it’s design payload, a Hiroshima-style atomic bomb.
When the U.S. landed in France in June 1944, Hitler realized it had become a war of attrition, and the end was only a matter of time. For instance, although the German tanks were obviously superior, U.S. factories produced 5 Shermans for every Panzer. He finally increased funding to advanced weapons research in hopes of finding a wonder-weapon that would slow the allies until his atomic bomb was operational.
Hortons bomber not only had a stealthy shape, with no vertical surfaces, government funding allowed him to develop a carbon-impregnated plywood skin that actually absorbed radar. He called it the Ho-IX, and the Luftwaffe selected the Gotha factory to build them with the Military designation Go-229. The lack of a fuselage meant less drag, so the 229 got 30% better fuel mileage than a conventional bomber of identical payload, and while using the same engines as the Me-262, it achieved higher speeds (623 mph vs. 540 mph)
Hitler correctly blamed the U.S. for his losses, and while the 229’s were being built, Horton was ordered to start a new design. When the U.S. army invaded the test facilities they found a full set of blueprints for a stealth bomber large enough to reach Washington D.C. and New York. It had three seats, six jet engines and the small bomb bay we now know was for an atomic device. It was the Ho-XVIII and was named the “Amerika Bomber”.
http://www.nurflugel.com
http://www.danford.net/horten.htm
http://www.luft46.com
The German WWII Atomic Bomb
Although It is obvious that The first operational A-bomb was dropped by the U.S. on Hiroshima, the U.S. found it desirable to imply that the Germans were far from being close to having an atomic weapon at the end of the war in 1945. Recently revealed information shows that this was not true and helps to explain why the Reich ordered the fighting to continue even into the streets of Berlin when it seemed obvious to everyone there simply was no hope. Its not a stretch to say that the top-secret project was actually only weeks away from completion, and even a casual study of Hitler shows he would not have hesitated to use it.
The war almost certainly would have been different if it were not for a little-known commando raid in February of 1943. Heavy water, or Deuterium, was a vital substance in the research that would lead to a workable device. The German war department built a heavy water factory at Vemork, in Norway. To outward appearances the factory made saltpeter, a component of gunpowder, but spies alerted the allies to its true purpose. A small group of commandos attacked the facility and blew it up. The Germans hoped the allies had destroyed it because it made saltpeter, a low priority target, so they rebuilt it and increased the security, hoping to not raise too much suspicion. Knowledge of its true importance was highly classified on both sides, but when the allies quickly used aircraft to bomb it again, the Germans were forced to build a secret underground plant deep in the heart of Germany. These events greatly delayed production of the precious, difficult to produce substance, and set the program back at least a year.
Japan and Russia were also working on an atomic bomb based on papers about physics that were published prior to the war, however, they simply didn’t have the scientific teams capable of making progress in this field. All of the minds that discovered the keys to unlocking the mysteries of the atom came from the German Universities. Albert Einstein was a professor at the University of Berlin during WW I, and when he saw the persecution of the Jews increasing, he emigrated to the U.S., and was instrumental in bringing the brightest minds from the physics community to the U.S., as they were predominantly also Jewish. There is also increasing evidence from secret documents de-classified in 1992 that show the leader of the German team, Heisenberg, had figured out how to make an atomic device. However, he purposefully slowed the research program of his colleagues and constantly implied the problems would take too long, and be too expensive and difficult to solve.
How ironic that Hitler’s persecution of the Jews denied him the Victory he craved, and actually handed world military dominance to his enemies.
http://visi.net/~djohnson/armament/abomb.htm
http://motlc.wiesenthal.org/text/x22/xr2265.htm
http://www.bullatomsci.org/issues/1992/s92/s92.goldberg.html
Guided Bombs and Missiles
In 1943 the German war department developed a guided glide bomb- the “Fritz X”. It was a 3,450 lb. Armor-piercing bomb with wings and a tail. When released by the aircraft, a flare was lit in it’s tail to make it more visible, and radio signals allowed the bombardier to use a joy-stick to “fly” it into the target. A ships munitions are stored deep in the center of it to protect them from exploding as a result of an enemy hit, so the Fritz X’s armor-piercing capability allowed it to penetrate deeply before detonating, ingeniously using the targets own ammunition against them. Immediately after the Fritz X was finished the German headquarters received word that the Italian battleship “Roma” was attempting to defect to the allies. On it’s first mission the Fritz X worked flawlessly and easily sank the Roma, but in an unbelievable turn of events, Goering reported that it was a failure, and the radio signals must have been jammed by the allies, forcing them to sink the ship with conventional bombs. Further development was ordered and the war dept. made the bomb WIRE-GUIDED! Still Goering suppressed it and it was later discovered that he knew about Hitlers interest in wonder weapons, and in an incredibly bad case of judgement the arrogant Goering did not want money and resources diverted from the machines he wanted to these new “toys”. To be fair, the aircraft had to maintain a stable flight so the bombardier could guide the bomb, making them vulnerable to enemy fighters. And from 1942 on chronic pilot and aircraft engine shortages made this a concern.
Hitler had no way of knowing if an atomic bomb would ever be operational, but by 1943 the Luftwaffe was capable of ordering the production of a night-flying stealth bomber to deliver guided bombs to the D-Day invasion build-up had they only decided to. It was decided that the parent aircraft vulnerability concerns would be addressed by another weapons system.
http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/annex/an41a.htm
The X-4 was fat in order to make a significant payload compact enough to fit inside the Ju-88 and He-111 bombers. It was decided to attach a liquid-fuelled rocket to a glide bomb to speed completion of the attack, but the X-4 was unsuitable. Heinkle had previously developed a 12 foot long glide bomb shaped like an airplane, but it’s non-folding wings meant it would have to be mounted outside an aircraft, so it was shelved. Its slender body restricted it to a smaller payload, but now made it the perfect candidate. A rocket was attached under it, but it was small to keep the weapon a usable size, and because it was determined that only a 10 second burn was required to make the ensuing downward fall quite rapid. Renamed the Hs-293, over 2300 were made, including a folding-wing variant, and it sank at least 5 allied ships. In spite of its success, the personnel vulnerability concerns remained and near the end it was being tested with 3 different homing devices that were never perfected. The “Radieschen” and “Flensburg” devices homed in on the radar beams from a land base, a ship, or an airplane. The “Madrid” and “Steinbock” devices would home in on the heat from a ship’s smokestack, or aircraft engines. The most amazing, though, was model “D”- a crude TV camera/viewer that would give the bomber a fuzzy, but usable image of an enemy ship or airplane, allowing for evasive maneuvers as soon as the weapon was launched.
http://www.warbirdsresourcegroup.org/hs293.html
Along these same lines, the Germans were far ahead of everyone else in Rocket research and guidance systems that resulted, but the late start of serious development efforts and the effect of constant Allied strategic bombing prevented these weapons from making any effective contribution. The famous V-2 was a milestone in rocket weapons, but as a terror weapon they did not break the British resolve to continue the fight. It was 46 feet tall, with a range of 150 miles. It could deliver a one ton payload at a speed of 3500 MPH. Shaped like a bullet with tailfins, the V-2 used two fuel tanks in order to eliminate the ignition system. It used liquid Hypergolic fuels that ignited upon contact with each other. It’s preferred fuels were mainly comprised of Ethanol and Liquid Oxygen, which were cheap and easy to make. However, many types were developed, since bombing restricted any particular set of fuels from being readily available. Almost 3000 V-2’s were launched against England, France and Holland, causing a death toll of about 7000.
The Atomic bomb the Germans were attempting to build was to be the correct size and shape for a V-2 payload. Also, at the end of the war an encapsulated launch system called “Platform XII” was under development. It was to be towed behind a submarine, and upon reaching the target area, a shift in water ballast would upright the pod for launch. A slight loss of range would accompany the necessary shift to a more stable pair of fuels for lengthy transport, such as Visol/Salbei.
http://www.nasm.edu/galleries/gal114/SpaceRace/sec200/sec210.htm
Another rocket weapon ahead of its time was the Wasserfall surface-to-air missile. It was based on V-2 research, but scaled down to a height of 25 feet. It had a range of 16 miles and could reach an altitude of 60,000 feet. For speed of development, it was initially produced to be guided with a joystick using radio signals, to detonate with a proximity fuse. A heat-seeking infrared homing device was being developed to self-direct the missile to the warm engines against the cold sky. As Allied raids often had over 1,000 bombers, Wasserfall production could not possibly hope to keep up. Those same strategic raids denied the rocket factories fuel and parts, so it was a brilliant design that ended up being ineffective.
http://visi.net/~djohnson/missile/wasserfl.htm
The other surface-to-air missile that showed promise was the Enzian E-4. It’s shape was based on the Me-163 “Komet” rocket fighter plane, but scaled down to a length of 4 meters. The warhead was a shrapnel, or “shotgun shell” design that proved very effective in testing. It was a test-bed for advanced homing devices and proximity fuses that were never completed and only 60 were made before the wars end. Lack of pilots and aircraft engines pushed for these last-ditch efforts, including the “Madrid” infra-red sensor by Kepka that homed in on the targets’ warm engines, and the “Pudel” acoustic sensor that homed in on the sound of the targets propellers. Other guided missiles that were operational used the “Stasburg/Kehl” Joystick/Radio signal system utilizing a 6 meter wave, and although enemy jamming had been rare, the E-4 used the new “Kogge” which had a difficult-to-jam 24cm wave.
http://www.warbirdsresourcegroup.org/LRG/enzian.html
Which brings us to the Kramer X-4. It was a six-foot long air-to-air missile. It was a cheap, rugged, and simple design that allowed for assembly by unskilled workers. Bombing of the BMW rocket engine factory prevented 1300 of these from being deployed against Allied bombers in the last days of WWII. It was initially developed to be launched just beyond machine-gun range and wire-guided by a joystick, controlled by the pilot. This was to speed development, but the design allowed for future use of the “Pudel” acoustic homing device, or the “Steinbock” infrared homing device still under development in order to allow the pilot to take evasive maneuvers after launch. All X-4’s had a contact fuse and also the “Kranich” acoustical proximity fuse that was attuned to the sound of a propeller.
http://visi.net/~djohnson/missile/x-4.html
The R4M was a solid fuel air-to-air rocket with a range of 5,000 ft. It had folding wings so more of them could be mounted on a fighter. It measured 2.2 in. wide by 32 in. long. It was sent to the field for use while guidance systems finished development and salvos did manage to down some Allied bombers. If it had received the heat-seeking homing device and proximity/contact fuses, I can not help but to notice the similarity to the highly successful American “sidewinder”
The twin-jet powered Me-262 fighter would have been especially effective using the X-4 or guided R4M’s. The Allies did not quickly respond with any plane fast enough to catch the 262. Over 1400 Me-262 bodies were built, but fewer than 400 saw combat due to a lack of pilots, fuel, and the difficult –to-make jet engines, which all fell victim to Allied strategic bombing. With few operational 262’s that were only armed with machine guns, the 262 never lived up to its expensive promise. The shortage of jet engines prompted the Luftwaffe to order development of the Me-1101, a single engine jet fighter. Only one prototype was made before the war ended, but a casual glance reveals it as the father of the American F-86. The Me-262’s engines were mounted under the wings, and although the 1101 had only one of the Jumo-004B engines, the lower wind resistance of its mounting inside the body gave it a higher top speed than it’s twin-engine brother. The body allowed for the use of the larger, more powerful Heinkel jet as soon as it would be available.
American money and technical ingenuity would have eventually created the F-86 and heat-seeking air-to-air missiles that were put to good use in the Korean war, but captured data given to the U.S.Army by fervently anti-communist Germans helped the U.S. start the cold war one step ahead of the Russians.
http://visi.net/~djohnson/mess/mep1101.html
WWII “Elektroboat” submarines
The German U-Boats played an important strategic role in Germanys quick, early successes. But this easy success produced a smug complacency, planting the seeds of their eventual defeat.
WW I had left Europe reeling, and unwilling to invest in a costly modernization of their military. Germany, however, invested heavily in modernizing tanks, aircraft, and submarines. Using a focused coordination of resources and moving quickly with “Blitzkrieg” tactics, they dominated Europe from Sept 1939, until the U.S. invaded France from England in June of 1944. From 1939 until the U.S. was fully involved building up troops in England in early 1942, the U-Boats controlled the Atlantic and strangled the supplies to the British, until they were teetering on the brink of collapse. Had it not been for Pearl Harbor drawing the U.S. into the war, England was one step away from being invaded by Hitler’s “Operation Sea Lion”. This would have denied the Allies a base in Europe, making an Allied invasion almost impossible, and it quite possibly would have allowed the German A-Bomb to stay on schedule for 1944.
The Allies committed all of their resources to the invasion of France in June 1944. If they had failed, there was no second act. D-Day did come close to failing, but once success was realized, the German panic resulted in changes that came too late to change the course of the war.
For example, the heavily defended shipyards that produced submarines used a conventional schedule of starting a U-Boat in a dry-dock and tying up that space the entire construction. After D-Day, submarine sections were built elsewhere and only assembled in the dry-dock, giving seven times the output. This method was known before the war, but deemed unnecessary and possibly vulnerable to supply line attacks, such as railroads and bridges being bombed. German research in 1940 came out with the advanced “Elektroboat” design, but again, complacency dictated a resistance to improvement when they were already enjoying easy success. When the Allies began using new weapons and tactics in 1942, the U-Boats were unable to stem the huge ship-borne build-up that stopped the loss of England and led to the success of D-Day, the turning point of that conflict.
The Elektroboats were a streamlined, modern shape. This shape, plus greatly increased battery capacity, boosted their speed dramatically, and allowed them to stay underwater longer. The invention of the “Walter” engine, which used Hydrogen Peroxide instead of air, also would have had a dramatic reduction of their need to snorkle when the enemy was near, or surface, which is when they were most vulnerable to Allied aircraft Radar. Also, one of the last U-Boats made had rubber-like coating that made it invisible to the sonar that was used to locate the U-Boats when underwater for depth-charging.
The U-Boats had a top deck that was cluttered, which limited its speed underwater (6 knots vs. 17 on the surface). As a result a “Wolf Pack” of several U-Boats could travel faster on the surface to quickly arrive where intelligence, or surveillance aircraft had indicated a convoy would pass by. They were not as fast as ships and had to be in place if they wanted to find any prey in the vast Atlantic. Allied aircraft forced the U-Boats to hunt at night, and when the newly improved Radar began finding Wolf Packs in the dark nights of 1942, the U-Boats found themselves neutralized and increasingly decimated from that time on.
These submarines ran off of electric batteries, and were actually very quiet, but for several hours each day they needed to run their diesel generators to top off the batteries. The snorkel allowed them to run their engines just under the surface, safe from Radar, but doing so severely limited their speed. When the tide turned against them they began demanding the necessary changes, but when the new technology finally arrived in the fleet, it was too late to stop D-Day, and it was a land war from that point on.
Another simple, missed opportunity was the result of a rivalry between the German air force and navy. Both felt a victory was certain in light of the success from 1939 to ’42, and both wanted as much of the glory for themselves as was possible. The navy’s inability to get as many long range reconnaissance aircraft, and as much long range fighter support as they wanted from the Luftwaffe doomed the U-Boats’ efforts to stop the U.S. build up from arriving in England. Before the war, Hitler (an army corporal in WW I) had grasped the importance of controlling the air over land; but concerning the navy, he continued to waste resources building surface ship types that were no longer useful. For example, the battleship Bismark was sunk by a torpedo dropped by a biplane left over from WW I. Fortunately for the Allies, he ignored building aircraft carriers like the U.S. and Japan, which would have extended his air power over the Atlantic. This, plus fielding 1500 Elektroboats in 1942 instead of several hundred Type VII submarines would have spelled the death knell for England, and thus, Europe.
http://www.uboat.net/technical/electroboats1.htm
http://www.uboat.net/types/xxi.htm
http://www.uboat.net/boats/u1105.htm
The German roots of the AK-47
One of the most famous weapons in history is the AK-47 assault rifle. The name means the Automatic Kalashnikov, model of 1947, but few people know that it’s a copy of a German assault rifle created and sent to the Russian front in the last days of WWII.
The two most common weapon systems found across the globe are the M-16 used by the U.S. and it’s many NATO allies, and the AK-47, used by Russia, China, dozens of former communist states, and hundreds of revolutionary groups. While the M-16 is an expensive, finely machined, precision device, the AK is noticeably crude. Here lies its benefit; it is not only easy and cheap to produce, it’s loose fit cycles more reliably. This is not an insignificant feature as half the U.S. Marines who died in Viet-Nam were found with their M-16 cracked open in an effort to un-jam them.
The thing that defines an assault rifle is twofold. First, it must have “selective fire”, meaning it can be switched from semi-auto (firing one shot each time the trigger is depressed) to “full-auto”, or continuous fire like a machine gun until the trigger is released. This was deemed valuable for the infantry following the tanks since during a breakthrough the fast moving infantry column could suddenly find itself tripping across a large cluster of enemy troops. The second feature was the use of an “intermediate” cartridge. More powerful than a pistol bullet, like the 9mm in the famous MP-40 sub-machine gun, And with less kick than the common 8mm-rifle bullet, which would be uncontrollable when firing full-auto from a light side arm. The cartridge they designed used a slug diameter of 8mm to utilize some of the existing tooling, coupled with a short case holding half the gunpowder of the full-sized round. The stubby case not only meant the bolt could cycle a short distance, it also incorporated an innovative flared shape.
Brass has a certain elastic quality that makes it the perfect metal for ammunition cases, but in the last year of WWII, German brass was in drastically short supply. The machine that made the cases was fed a grade of steel that was similar to brass, but the shells were difficult to extract from the infantry rifles after they were fired, causing jams.
The flared shape of the StG-44 cartridge allowed the use of cheap and available steel without jamming, and the weapon was clip-fed for quick and easy reloading. A batch was sent to the eastern front in the last days, and the captured weapons went on to fame as a Russian invention.
It was the SturmGewehr-44 or Storm Rifle, model of 1944.
Infrared “Night Vision”
I recently stumbled across some information about German night-vision technology developed by AEG in WWII, and I was quite surprised to read it, as I had assumed these types of devices, albeit crude in their infancy did not arrive until many years later. After the war, night-vision devices became smaller and more portable because their sensitivity had increased to the point where they only required a receiver, as the moon or star-light provided enough illumination when amplified to create an image that was usable.
German WWII night vision devices required the addition of a searchlight, or “scheinwerfer” generating infra-red energy that was not visible to the human eye. The receiver was called an image transducer, or “bildwandler”. By wars end the firm of Leitz produced 310 sets of the “Vampir”(Vampire) system that included a 5 lb. rifle-mounted ZF-1229 receiver, with wires leading to a 28 lb. backpack holding batteries and other components. The “Uhu” (Owl) half-track mounted 60cm IR searchlight provided illumination.
The last year of the war also saw approximately 50 Panzers outfitted with the “Sperber”(Sparrow Hawk) system using a 30cm IR searchlight with the tank commander, driver, and gunner each having their own FG-1250 receiver.
In April of 1945, a few weeks before the end of the war, several Panzers equipped for night-fighting (nacht-jager) approached the German town of Uelzen at night and destroyed an entire platoon of British “Comet” tanks with no losses.
com.www.arctic-1/works2.htm
http://www.achtungpanzer.com/ir.htm
The German roots of the Wright bros. Airplane
I’ve always been fascinated by airplanes, and I certainly don’t wish to imply that the Wright brothers do not deserve to be regarded as the fathers of aircraft. They are not only the great pioneers of flight, they are also a wonderful example of the methodical, scientific approach to solving a design problem.
Wilber and Orville Wright were the successful owners of a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. For several months each winter the shop would close down during the bad weather. This meant they were mechanically capable, they had some disposable income to spend on a hobby, and they had time to pursue their interests. Their biggest interest was the possibility of flight. They wrote to the Smithsonian Institute, asking for copies of any recent research. This was a wise, time-saving choice, as the Smithsonian had been closely watching developments from around the world. The two brothers wrote that the most useful information they received was about Otto Lielenthal, a German designer of what we now call hang gliders.
Several people were making serious efforts to produce a workable craft. They were all using light weight engines and propellers, but the common problem was achieving enough lift and controlling the craft once in the air. Lielenthal’s notes showed that a wing that was curved on top created more lift. They didn’t know why, but at this stage every ounce of efficiency was needed. The Wrights built a wind tunnel several feet long and experimented with small wing shapes. They found the cross-section that created the most lift, and in order to get the most lift from the lightest wing, the wind tunnel showed them the “Chord” or width to length ratio that was the most efficient. This meant that once they knew the approximate weight of the craft, they could calculate the smallest and lightest size of wing that could lift itself. They calculated the amount of horsepower they would need so they could custom build an engine that was as light as possible. They decided to use only one engine to save weight, but in order to make the rotation of a propeller less of an influence on the controllability problem, they used two counter-rotating props. With all of this in mind, they began building full-sized gliders to study control, the last problem to solve. They spent their winters at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, which had broad sand dunes and steady winds.
A hang glider pilot shifts his weight from front to back and side to side in order to control the craft. The Wrights started out with horizontal stabilizers and vertical rudders, but sooner or later a minor difference in the wind across the two wings would make one side dip, causing a crash. Sometime over that next summer Orville was holding a small box from a bicycle inner-tube, and he noticed that when he twisted it, he could visualize the two wings of their craft occasionally twisting to keep the plane level. This turned out to be the final key. They built a glider the next winter that used a control stick to pull wires to twist the wing tips, and they were very excited to find the craft was completely controllable. They redid all the calculations and built the “Wright Flyer” that made history on December 17th of 1903.
The Curtiss company had been building lightweight motorcycle engines, and was hired by Alexander Graham Bell to develop aircraft for the anticipated aviation boom. Once the Wrights had published their research, Curtiss was able to design a craft that would work. Wilber Wright, the businessman of the two brothers, died in 1912, and although The Wrights did enjoy financial success, and some Army contracts for reconnaissance planes, the next great war saw the more powerful Curtiss planes dominating the American aircraft market. In 1929, they bought out the Wright aircraft concerns and patents, forming Curtiss-Wright .
The first Automobiles
Two Germans, Carl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler, were working separately on the Idea of the automobile. Later, the successful Daimler motors would be renamed “Mercedes” and then a short time after that, they would merge with the successful Benz Motor Co. to help them both through a German economic depression thus forming “Mercedes-Benz” in 1926.
To understand the invention of the first automobile, you must first see the pieces of the puzzle that came before it. Previous to the industrial revolution, factories were located alongside a river. The running water could turn a water-wheel, which powered the machines inside. When the steam engine was invented to run a pump to empty water out of coal mines in England, it forever changed life. The new machines powered trains, ships that had previously depended on sails, and factories. This not only created an industrial boom, it created companies who devised machines that could cheaply mass produce pistons, crankshafts, and cylinders.
Back in the U.S. a man named Getty started “Standard Oil” to begin pumping up and distilling crude oil in Pennsylvania. The heavier components were sold as lubricating oils for machinery, but were so plentiful, they could only be sold cheap. The real profits were from the middle components, sold as “kerosene” to replace the expensive whale-fat oils that fueled portable lamps at night. The lighter components burned hot and fast, so they were useless as a fuel, and were practically given away as a cleaning solvent called “Benzine”. This made Benzine, or as we now call it, Gasoline, plentiful and cheap.
The next piece of the puzzle is the internal combustion engine. The steam engines that were now profitably running large factories required skilled operators, and sometimes exploded from the high pressures they were run at.
About this time someone discovered that if you heated coal, it would give off a flammable gas that could be sold, and the coal was still burnable. This inexpensive coal-gas (methane) was much less expensive and messy than lighting your home with kerosene burning lamps. Cities began building coal-gas plants and piping it into people’s homes and factories. A German named Bosch invented the collapsing field coil that produced a spark, which led to a German named Nikolaus Otto inventing a large, one cylinder, four-stroke, coal-gas-burning engine to run factory equipment. It was less expensive, smaller, simpler and easier to operate than a steam plant. It’s success immediately brought imitators, but it was still connected to the gas-pipe.
Technically, by this time, steam powered cars had been invented, but they were large, ungainly, difficult to operate, and prone to explosions when over-pressurized. Daimler and Benz both experimented with gasoline-powered engines, but it was Daimler who invented the carburetor that would mist the liquid fuel and mix in the proper amount of air to achieve the success of a portable engine. He built a motorcycle to prove the gasoline engines value in 1885. He determined that motorcycles were dangerous, and immediately began enjoying financial success selling gasoline engines to boat owners. He finally put one of his engines on a four-wheel cart a year later for amusement. Benz, however, hearing of the carburetor in 1885 immediately put one on an engine to power a three-wheel cart to be credited with the first practical car. He then quickly built up a successful company making and selling cars. Daimler had been interested in developing a car, but he was so overwhelmed with the success of his boat motor company, he only began making cars much later, and even then he only made small quantities of expensive luxury and performance cars as a sideline.
Recording Tape
I had never really thought much about the recording tape that’s found in music cassettes and VCR tapes, but once, while reading about WWII, I stumbled across the fact that reel-to-reel recording tape had been invented to record Adolph Hitler’s speeches for history. I was annoyed that it was so directly associated with Hitler, but it is another example of German engineers being given a goal and developing a solution that is so basically practical and affordable, it is still in widespread use today.
1934 Auto-Union Race Car
Before WW I, the gifted engineer Ferdinand Porsche had spent some time working on aircraft. Evidence of this is found in a flat, four-cylinder, air-cooled airplane engine he designed in 1912. Further evidence of this is seen in a car he designed for the German motorcycle company NSU, that was dramatically more rounded and lightweight when compared to the cars of the day. NSU decided against making the car, and later the German government decided that they would make it using the 1912 aircraft engine. It became world-famous as the Volkswagen Bug.
Porsche had always loved cars and even won a race using an electric-gasoline hybrid car he designed and built in 1900. He always kept an eye on current racing developments and for years toyed with the idea of how he would design the “ultimate race car” if ever given the chance. In 1933, the new Nazi government wished to promote German achievement in all fields, and gave money to Mercedes and Auto-Union to help them win as many International Grand Prix races as possible. The Mercedes built the W25. Although built of the best materials with the highest quality of workmanship, it was conventional for the day. It employed an in-line supercharged 8-cylinder, with the standard front-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout. It was extremely reliable and won many races. Porsche was hired to design the A-U car, and though his ideas were advanced for that time, he had the entire car ready in his mind before he was offered the job. There was no time for research and development, so as soon as the car was ready, it would have to race. This meant it would miss the first few races of ’34 and immediately encounter many mechanical difficulties.
The Mercedes had it’s fuel tank in the back, and when at half-level it’s weight was balanced equally on all four wheels. When it had a full tank, or a low tank, it had to slow way down on the curves to keep from spinning out. The A-U would have a mid-engine layout, with the fuel tanks on the sides, so the traction of all four tires could be used to take the curves faster than anyone else.
In order to make the A-U slightly more aerodynamic than the other cars, it’s cubic inches were put in an expensive V-16 configuration. The short-stroke V-block had a small cross-section, and with it’s overhead cam, super-charger, and 10,000 RPM redline, it made over 500 horsepower. Couple this with its weighing only 750 Kg (1,653 lbs.), it could spin the tires at 150 MPH if the driver stepped on the gas too hard. It had four-wheel independent suspension, and used lightweight, compact torsion bars instead of leaf springs. To save the weight of two hoses, the coolant was run through the tube frame to the radiator in the front.
Porsche noticed that when most cars came out of a curve and the driver stepped on the accelerator, quite often one wheel would spin, while the other just rolled along, losing valuable traction. This was caused by the differential, and was just accepted. When a car turns a sharp corner, the inside wheel travels a much shorter distance than the outside wheel. The differential allows this to happen smoothly, but when in mud or snow, it is common for one wheel to spin and the other to just roll along as a result. Porsche contacted the German firm of ZF, and had them develop what we now call Posi-Traction, where the differential works on the curves, but when you reach the straights and accelerate, both wheels lock together to provide maximum traction. This is the earliest reference I’ve found for a locking differential.
The first website listed has technical and historical data and the second has excellent photographs of this wonderful milestone of automobile history.
http://www.ddavid.com/formula1/rcg.htm
http://www.pirro.com/german/pirro/Galleries/AutoUnion/AutoUnion.htm
Advanced WW II German Aircraft Research
As mentioned before, Germany had Stunning successes from 1939 to 1941. This was clearly because after WW I the allies did not modernize their weapons or tactics. There is an old adage that “Nations prepare to fight the last war” but the Interwar period was one of the few in history where a nations military leader created the exact weapons and tactics that would win the next war.
This man was Hans VonSeekt. The treaty of Versaille severely restricted the size of Germany’s military, and the long economic depression meant the army could have its pick of Germany’s best and brightest to fill the handful of desirable slots. Military stars like Guderian and Rommel rose to prominence while arguing for the need to have a fast-moving, fluid attack which was coordinated with artillery and ground-support aircraft and tank types that had not even been invented yet. American observers laughed at German exercises using plywood tanks on cars. 15 years of discussions had weeded out all but the best ideas, and when Hitler came to power in 1933 the new German war machine would begin making mature designs, instead of starting from scratch.
In September of 1939 Germany and Russia divided up Poland like a pie, and the Polish capital of Warsaw was so utterly destroyed that France and Czechoslovakia fell to the much smaller German army with almost no resistance in order to avoid the same fate.
Had VonSeekt had any influence at this point, he would have certainly tried to imagine how the Allies would be reacting and then devised even newer weapons and tactics to stay one step ahead of them, but Hitler and Goering were not in the same league as VonSeekt. They both wanted continued success using the same weapons and tactics, even after the Allies quickly changed the rules of the game.
When it was obvious the war had turned against them in 1943, Funding was returned to advanced weapons and aircraft research. Fortunately, this came too late to help the Nazi regime, but the flurry of research the last two years produced astounding prototypes and ideas that were far ahead of their time.
For example, before the war a man named Whittle invented a workable jet engine in England that used a centrifugal compressor. This means air would come into the front of the engine to the center of a spinning ribbed plate, where the air would be flung outward, only to be caught and redirected to the rear. Since the air had to make two 90-degree turns, the design was inefficient from the start. The first British jet to fly with this type (Gloster E.28/39) only attained a speed of 338 MPH, at a time when the propeller-driven spitfire was capable of 430 MPH. The Germans had tested hundreds of shapes in wind-tunnels and when the British finally had access to the German data after the war they produced their first delta-winged supersonic bomber. It was the DeHavilland D.H.108 which you can see at (www.soton.ac.uk/~genesis/Videos/Dh108_1.mpg) It could not be a coincidence that it resembles the German Lippisch Li-P.11 from 1942, which you can see at (http://visi.net/~djohnson/lippisch/lip11-2.html).
From the beginning of German jet design, VonOhain used the layout that is used by all jets to this day, the axial-flow compressor. The inlet of the jet is a funnel shape and a stack of fans compress the air into the small center, where fuel is added and a spark source ignites the mix. For efficiency, a fan in the exhaust blast turns the compressors in the front by a connecting shaft. The Me-262 jet fighter entered service in 1943 and was capable of 540 MPH. The Me-262 was started years before, but at the end of the war the Me-P.1101 prototype was able to fly at 609 MPH and is immediately recognizable as the seed from which the American F-86 and Russian MiG-15 were derived. The German engineers had also created several types of ram-jets. This is where the forward motion of the craft crams the air into the funnel-shaped inlet and this achieves enough compression to sustain ignition of the fuel, while still efficiently using the air as an oxidizer. It wouldn’t work until it was already travelling at least 150 MPH, so a small rocket would boost the craft past that speed. Then the ram-jet would take over and could propel the craft to beyond Mach speeds, had the research continued. This cutting-edge technology was pursued because ram-jets were much simpler to build and many Me-262 bodies were lacking the complex jet engines due to Allied strategic bombing. The Lippisch P-13a was to be a ram-jet powered delta-winged fighter. Scale models had been taken up to Mach 2.3, as fast as the wind tunnel could go, and was completely stable. A full-sized glider was built and dropped from a bomber, and the pilot reported that it was very controllable, but the Allies captured the facility before the ramjet could be installed. This is only the tip of the iceberg. The http://www.luft46.com website (projects that would be operational in 1946) is filled with hours of reading.