Engines

There would have been no "GREAT" WWI a/c without great engine developement. As goes the engine, so goes the a/c. Image, if the Wright Bros had a M-B 180 hp engine for the FLYER. Or if the DVII had the engine from the FLYER.

[Greybeard]

I too love engines and agree they has been always the premise of any aeronautical development. FLYER itself would never fly without its special engine, created by Wright brothers theirself for that specific purpose.

Reginald Mitchell, designer of Spitfire, said:<<to make a great airplane? Take a good engine and put around less "aircraft" you can!>>

[Dan_San_Abbott]

topgun56:
I believe the greatest engine to come out of WW1 was the Hispano-Suiza. It's monoblock design established the aircraft engine design for all future aero engines. All the other engines of WW1 had individual cylinders or blocks of dual or triple cylinders such as Mercedes or Benz early engines. It was such a design that produced high horsepower for the lightest possible weight. All the future major engines employed the monoblock construction. RR Merlin, Daimler-Benz DB600 series, Fiat and the US Allison. All these engines had engines in their ancestry that used individual cylinders in their in-line six or V12 designs.
Blue skies,
Dan

[Ransom E. Olds]

If we can regard the Lorraine Dietrich family of W12 engines of the 1920s as major designs, they are then exceptions to the monobloc inline design following the Hisso pattern. These Lorraine designs continued to employ pairs of individual cylinders contained within sheet-steel jackets--in this case six sets of paired cylinders aligned in three rows. The Lorraine Dietrich series was made not only in France, but also, I believe, licensed in Czechoslovakia and Poland. Ransom

[R Pope]

The Hisso technology overflowed into the automotive field when some enterprising mechanics fitted them into race cars, leading to today's V8's.

Please remember it was Charlie Taylor that designed and built, by hand, the Wright's engine.

F=MA

[franzkait]

Taylor did not designed this engines

Design and manufacture weren't divorced in the Wright shop, as they are now. Design was going on at each stage of building the engine. Crude sketches were contributed by both Taylor and the Wrights, and then all of the building was done by Taylor. The Wrights gave him the expected parameters, four cylinders, four inch bore, four inch stroke, must make 9 BHP, no more than 200 pounds AUW. Taylor gave genius-level craftsmanship and intuitive technical skill, desinging and redesigning as he went along to produce the one-off finished product.

To say he didn't design the engine completely underestimates his contribution to the project.

F=MA

[franzkait]

read the 2 books about the Wrights, from McFarland

[Dan_San_Abbott]

F=MA:
While the Wright engine was ingenious and brilliant in concept, it did not influence engine design into the future as did the Hisso.
blue skies,
Dan-San