Yesterday We Were in America

Alcock and Brown, First to Fly the Atlantic Non-Stop

Brendan Lynch

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780750990004
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750991094
• Topic: Technologie et ingénierie
• Subtopic: Aviation

On 14 June 1919 – eight years before Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic – two men from Manchester took off in an open-cockpit Vickers Vimy and flew into the history books. They battled through a sixteen-hour journey of snow, ice and continuous cloud, with a non-functioning wireless and a damaged exhaust that made it impossible to hear each other. And then, just five hours away from Ireland and high above the sea, the Vimy stalled. Yesterday We Were in America is the incredible story of John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown, and how they gave hope to a post-war world that was in grave need of it.

1

FREE OF THE PRISON OF GRAVITY

Everyone who crosses between Europe and America owes them a debt. But how did they do it in that flimsy machine?

Harry Sullivan

Seven-year-old Harry Sullivan was in bed with measles in Clifden, on the west coast of Ireland, on the damp morning of Sunday, 15 June 1919. He recalls:

Because I was sick, I wasn’t allowed to go to morning Mass with the rest of the family. It wasn’t long after the big flu epidemic which had killed more people than the recently ended Great War. My parents weren’t taking any chances.

They had hardly left when I heard this terrible noise. It seemed to be coming from the sky. I was as curious as I was scared. Measles or not, I rushed outside to investigate. I was just in time to see this greyish-coloured machine swooping over the main street. Its two propellers were whizzing around and its huge wings nearly touched the top of the church. I was amazed. I had heard of flying ’planes but I had never seen one before. I watched as it roared away towards the bog under the low cloud, its wings swaying up and down.

The noise was very loud, I could hear it for a long time. It must have been awful for the men inside. Where had the machine come from, where was it going? I would have something to tell my parents when they returned – but how could I tell them without saying I had gone out in the street?

Harry did not know it, but he had witnessed the conclusion of one of the most significant and dramatic flights in aviation history. The pilot of the Vickers Vimy aeroplane was John Alcock, his navigator was Arthur Whitten Brown. Eight minutes after the youngster saw them, the two Englishmen landed beside the Marconi radio station in nearby Derrygimla bog. Deafened by a broken engine exhaust, they had lost their radio and endured iced-up controls and a near-fatal stall. Completely exposed to the elements in their open-cockpit biplane, they had survived fog, snow and virtually continuous cloud to become the first persons to fly the Atlantic ocean non-stop. Yet, navigating blind for most of the way, they landed just 20 miles off target after their 16hr marathon of 1,880 miles, the longest distance ever flown by man.

Staff from the Marconi station struggled across the swampy ground to rescue them. At first they did not believe that the fliers had crossed the Atlantic. ‘Yesterday we were in America,’ John Alcock vainly reiterated. It took a sealed mailbag from St John’s, Newfoundland, to convince the Marconi men. Their cheers rang across the infinity of greeny scrub and boggy pools as they escorted the fliers to their warm station. But this was nothing to the acclaim that greeted Alcock and Brown on their triumphant return home via Galway, Dublin, and Holyhead. A quarter of a million people lined their train route and the streets of London, to welcome the men who a short time previously had languished in prisoner-of-war camps. Within a week of wading through Derrygimla, they braved the carpets of Windsor Castle to be knighted by King George V.

Alcock and Brown’s achievement had a major psychological impact. It helped war-weary Britons turn a corner from the recent catastrophic conflict and the world’s most devastating epidemic, the Spanish flu of 1918–19. Emerging triumphant from an Irish bog, the fliers had made a giant step out of the shadow of war and pestilence to reassert man’s potential. Their success redirected attention to the future and opened a window to previously unconsidered possibilities. It inspired hope that man and technology could combine to build a brighter more secure world. That world had suddenly become a much smaller and, hopefully, safer place. Brown himself optimistically wrote: ‘The aeroplane may well become a greater influence towards internationalisation than a signed covenant of the League of nations.’

Similar adulation greeted the epic solo ocean crossings by Charles Lindbergh in 1927 and Amelia Earhart in 1932. But, courageous as these aviators were, their flights were made in enclosed cockpits, with the advantage of superior navigational and meteorological aids. They had the benefit of lighter, more reliable and more efficient engines. Lindbergh carried little over half of Alcock and Brown’s enormous handicap of 865gal of fuel.

Eschewing heroics and hype, Alcock and Brown had braved the unknown in a comparatively primitive machine wide open to the elements. Their success against the odds in completing the world’s first epic aerial voyage was the most notable aviation feat after the Wright Brothers’ earliest powered flights. First to bridge the Atlantic non-stop, the Vimy pair laid the foundations of worldwide travel for everyman a mere sixteen years after the Wrights first staggered into the air in a powered aeroplane. They are arguably two of the greatest and most unsung heroes of the early 20th century.

Alcock and Brown’s unification of the continents was the logical outcome of man’s obsession with transport, which dated from the invention of the wheel in Mesopotamia around 4000 BC. The chariot increased man’s speed and his control of space and territory. Progression to four wheels relieved his shoulders of carrying burdens. The first dugout boat enabled him to navigate water; slowly in the beginning, until sail and then steam hastened his progress. The proliferation of the bicycle in the late nineteenth century provided a foretaste of the possibilities of individual long-distance transportation. After the railway revolution, the internal combustion engine and the automobile introduced the single most important development in transport and social mobility since the wheel. Only the air remained to be conquered.

The philosopher Socrates insisted, ‘Man must rise above the Earth – to the top of the atmosphere and beyond – for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives.’ Two thousand years later Arthur Whitten Brown reiterated the dream of flight:

I believe that ever since man, but recently conscious of his own existence, saw the birds, he has desired to emulate them. Among the myths and fables of every race are tales of human flight. The paradise of most religions is reached through the air, and through the air many gods and prophets have passed from earth to their respective heavens.

Man marvelled at the freedom of the birds and their power to go where he could not. He could catch birds and he could tame them, but he could only watch while they effortlessly soared to heights denied to him. In Greek mythology the Athenian craftsman Daedalus made wings of wax and feathers so that he and his son Icarus could escape from King Minos of Crete. They flew away, but Icarus rose too near the sun, which melted the wax of his wings. He fell into the sea and was drowned, and his father buried him on the Aegean island now known as Ikaria.

In real life, the early Chinese were the first to venture into the air, with unmanned kites. Made from bamboo and silk, these are said to have been flown in China 3,000 years ago. The devices were used to carry messages into the heavens to the gods. One was used for observation during a city siege in 200 BC. A man-carrying kite was allegedly flown in China in AD 559. On his return to Europe, Marco Polo described how kites were constructed and controlled.

Balloons provided man’s earliest documented means of leaving the ground, and greatly stimulated interest in flight. Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier experimented with hot-air balloons in 1782. Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandre made the first manned flight a year later from Versailles, but de Rozier became aviation’s earliest casualty when he was killed while attempting to cross the English Channel. Italian embassy employee Vincent Lunardi made the first ascent in Britain in September 1784. The Channel was crossed the following year by Jean-Pierre Blanchard and his American passenger, Dr John Jefferies. Ballooning became popular with the aristocracy and the adventurous, but as time went by the limitations of balloons became tiresome. Without motive power there was no directional control, their operators were slaves to the winds. How could one achieve more controllable flight?

Thinkers and scientists such as Leonardo da Vinci long pondered the secret of heavier-than-air flight. Philip Hitti claims in his History of the Arabs that Ibn Firnas was the first man in history to make a scientific attempt at flying. Commemorated by a statue in Baghdad and the Ibn Firnas moon crater, the Cordoban inventor and poet allegedly flew the equivalent of a modern hang-glider in Andalusia in AD 877. Leonardo da Vinci made over 100 drawings illustrating his theories on bird and mechanical flight. His ornithopter (flapping-wing) flying machines were never built, and neither was the vertical-screw design that presaged the modern helicopter. Inspired by Leonardo, Hezarfen Ahmet Celebi is said to have glided across the Bosphorus from Istanbul’s Galata Tower in 1638.

One of the earliest to begin to unlock the secret of heavier-than-air flight was a remarkable English Baronet, Sir George Cayley, Member of Parliament for Scarborough, who lived from 1773 to 1857. He prophesied:

I am well convinced that ‘Aerial Navigation’ will form a most prominent feature in the progress of civilisation ... and that we shall be able to transport ourselves and our families, and their goods and chattels, more securely by air than by water, and with a velocity of from 20 to 100 miles per hour.

The key to flight is lift, the ability to raise an object against the pull of gravity. To overcome an aeroplane’s weight its wing must generate this opposing force, which is produced by the motion of the machine through the air. Cayley discovered that air passing over a curved surface travels faster than the air passing across its undersurface. The faster airflow over a cambered, bird-like wing creates an area of low pressure above the curved section (or aerofoil), which generates lift, supplemented to a small degree by increased pressure on the underside. Modern delinquents regularly demonstrate this when they put a hand, palm downward, out of a car window. The hand immediately and wondrously rises, thanks to the lift generated by the different speed of the air currents above and below it. Racing cars use aerofoils in reverse to create downthrust, which improves traction and enables them to corner at scarcely credible speeds.

In half a century of experimenting Cayley established the basic forces acting on an aeroplane: lift against weight, and thrust against drag. He summarised the challenge as ‘to make a surface support a given weight by the application of power to the resistance of the air’. He suggested the use of a cruciform tail as a means of obtaining longitudinal and lateral stability.

After experimenting with a kite modified into a glider, the first device to establish the basic format of an aeroplane, Cayley followed further models with the first gliders to carry a boy, and then man, successfully. Britain’s earliest licensed pilot, J.T.C. Moore-Brabazon (later Lord Brabazon of Tara) insisted: ‘It was with the glider that Sir George really laid his claim to fame, and it was because he worked along these lines that he was rightly named the father of aeronautics. The modern aeroplane is only a glider pushed along by a motor.’

Cayley never found a suitable power source. His gunpowder engine failed, and steam engines were much too heavy and cumbersome. The internal combustion engine, which powered the Wright brothers’ aeroplanes, was not developed during his lifetime. But, fifty years before the brothers, his gliders accomplished the world’s first manned heavier-than-air flights across Yorkshire’s Brompton Dale. The passenger of his man-carrier, coachman John Appleby, protested: ‘Please, Sir George, I wish to give notice. I was hired to drive, not to fly.’

Californian John Joseph Montgomery built a glider that was destroyed after its first take-off in 1883, and his subsequent machines were also unsuccessful. It was Germany’s Otto Lilienthal who made a major contribution to heavier-than-air flight, making over 2,000 hang-glider flights. He was experimenting with a small compressed-gas engine of his own design when he was killed in a glider crash in 1896. Lilienthal influenced Bath-born engineer Percy Sinclair Pilcher. Had Pilcher procured some modest backing he could well have become the first person to make a powered flight in his new and untested triplane, though he would have faced difficult problems of control. But the 33-year-old Englishman died in a Leicestershire field in 1899, while making a towed demonstration flight in his Hawk glider. (A modern, powered reproduction of the triplane flew for nearly a minute and a half in 2003, longer than the Wright brothers’ longest flight on 17 December 1903.)

Octave Chanute, a Chicago railroad engineer and bridge-builder, had also influenced Pilcher. He improved upon Otto Lilienthal’s designs, evolving a biplane hang-glider. His example, plus Lilienthal’s experiments and writings, in turn influenced the brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright of Dayton, Ohio, in the USA. Wilbur confessed in a letter to Chanute: ‘For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. The disease has increased in severity and I feel it will soon cost me an increased amount of money, if not my life.’

Supporters of Gustave Whitehead claimed that the Bavarian-born builder of gliders and powered aeroplanes flew a bat-winged powered machine in Connecticut in 1901, but there is no documentary evidence or even photographs of the machine to confirm this. Thus the methodical Wright brothers have been recognised as the first to make successful powered, sustained and controlled flights. They became interested in aviation in 1878, when their father gave them a toy helicopter propelled by a rubber band. Orville was a successful cycle racer, and the brothers decided in 1896 to take advantage of the new cycling craze by manufacturing machines themselves. Their business flourished and ensured them sufficient income to indulge their passion for flight. They built their first glider in 1899. Fortuitously, a suitable power source was now available, the internal-combustion petrol engine that drove the fledgling automobile.

The Wrights’ cycle manufacturing experience encouraged their constant search for lightness combined with strength, and enabled them to design and machine parts for their experimental gliders. Without financial backing or government support they spent years on patient gliding experiments, and even constructed a wind tunnel in which to test wing sections. Wilbur Wright noted:

It was, in fact, the first wind tunnel in which small models of wings were tested and their lifting properties accurately noted. From all the data that Orville and I accumulated into tables, an accurate and reliable wing could finally be built.

Riding bicycles and observing birds had informed the Wrights on banking and turning. They focused on the crucial issue of flight control. A rear rudder managed left or right turns, while a horizontal rudder, or elevator, controlled pitch, nose up or down. Wilbur’s implementation of wing warping, a twisting motion of the wings to produce lateral or roll control, was the final keystone. Having mastered the basics of control in their gliders, the brothers supplied the outstanding ingredient of power by building their own four-cylinder engine, designing their own efficient propellers, and incorporating both in a new biplane. On the morning of 17 December 1903 they soared into history with four short powered flights on the sandy Atlantic shores of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. It was a monumental advance for the human species. For the first time in his long earth habitation, man had broken free from the prison of gravity.

The Wrights provided the New York Herald with the earliest first-hand description of flying:

Our most acute sensations are during the first minute of fli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword to Previous Edition by Len Deighton
• Foreword to new edition by Group Captain A.J.H. Alcock, MBE, RAF, nephew of John Alcock
• Alcock and Brown – Rare Aviators by Steve Fossett
• Acknowledgements
• Map of Route
• Introduction to Previous Edition
• Introduction to Centenary Edition
• 1 Free of the Prison of Gravity
• 2 The Apprenticeship of John Alcock
• 3 Alcock Meets Brown
• 4 Construction of the Atlantic Vimy
• 5 All Roads Lead to Newfoundland
• 6 Final Four Atlantic Contestants
• 7 Hawker and Grieve Survive Ditching
• 8 The Vimy’s Final Preparations
• 9 Dramatic Take-Off
• 10 The Vimy Loses Radio and Exhaust
• 11 Nothing but Cloud
• 12 Surviving a Stall
• 13 A Boggy Landing
• 14 International Acclaim
• 15 Homecoming and Honours
• 16 Rouen Claims Alcock
• 17 Brown Remembers St John’s
• 18 Monuments and Tribute Flights
• Appendix: Centenary Boardwalk Provides Easier Access to Vimy Landing Site
• Bibliography