Powered, controlled flight (by humans, at least) started on September 24, and you’ll be surprised by the year. It was 1852. It was a rigid airship — a dirigible, if you will, although “dirigible” just means “rigid airship”— designed and built by Henri Giffard. It made a 27 kilometer trip from Paris to Élancourt, but the wind picked up and Giffard was unable to fly back to Paris. Hydrogen provided the lift, and a small steam engine turned the propeller. Now, suspending a steam engine, which needs a way to boil the water, right underneath a large amount of hydrogen seems like an idea with a big potential downside, but Giffard tried to reduce the risk of explosion by pointing the chimney downward, and mixed the exhaust steam into the smoke to hopefully reduce the possibility of sparks. It worked, as did the horizontal and vertical rudders he designed.
It seems strange that the first powered and controlled flight took place as early as 1852 because there isn’t any evidence of a burst of innovation in flight — even by dirigibles — until decades later. And the flight was far from a secret; it was front-page news in France, and there’s at least one surviving photograph of the machine above Paris. But there wasn’t an immediate dirigible craze.
It would be as if the incandescent light bulb was introduced, then everybody said “um, yeah, nice toy, but candles and lamps work just fine for us.” Oh, wait, that’s exactly what did happen. Although Thomas Edison is generally credited with “inventing” the light bulb, but the first incandescent light was unveiled by Humphry Davy in 1802. It wasn’t practical, but there were usable electric lights by 1850. Edison’s refinement didn’t arrive for nearly 80 years, and it was years after that before electric lights became anything more than a novelty.
But some new ideas do eventually catch on. By September 24, 1911, the British military had finally been convinced that dirigibles might be useful, and they were just putting the final touches on “His Majesty’s Airship Number 1,” readying it for the initial flight. But a storm blew in, and the dirigible was wrecked by the wind. It never flew at all, and provided Winston Churchill with a good quip. The dirigible was nicknamed the “Mayfly,” and in a speech to Parliament he recommended against building any more because of the experience with the “Won’t Fly.” And as you might recall, German zeppelins are remembered from that era, but there weren’t any English ones.
Aviation proceeded anyway, though, with airplanes taking the lead from airships. They could fly perfectly well in good, clear daylight, but pilots soon noticed that about half the time, it gets dark. Not to mention that sometimes it’s foggy. They needed a way to fly in those conditions too.
The answer was instruments that delivered the data pilots needed regardless of whether they could see outside. Jimmy Doolittle was the first to manage to take off, fly to a destination, and land completely by instruments, on September 24, 1929. They knew he’d done it because his airplane didn’t have a single window. Instrument flying came in handy on September 24, 1950 in eastern North America. It was covered by a thick haze all day because of a huge forest fire in the western part of the continent (stop me if this is sounding too familiar).
Once aviation became a 24-hour, all-weather (well, most-weather) possibility, the commercial possibilities, um, took off (sorry). Airlines began to appear, and on September 24, 1946 — right after the end of WWII — Cathay Pacific, the carrier based in Hong Kong, was founded. It’s still around, and it’s among the top ten air carriers worldwide. Even though it’s connected with Hong Kong, though, it was founded by an American and an Australian; nobody actually from Hong Kong was involved.
A couple of years later, though, someone from Hamamatsu, Japan was definitely involved in the founding — on September 24 — of the Honda Motor Company. It was, of course, Soichiro Honda. You might be wondering why Honda has popped up in a narrative that seems to be developing an aviation-related theme? It’s simple: Honda makes airplanes. Business jets including the Honda HA-420 “HondaJet.” They’re made in North Carolina, and they carry 7 or 8 people (including the pilot) up to about 1400 miles.
That’s obviously not far enough to cross a big ocean. Generally, in fact, you need a much larger aircraft carrying a lot more fuel to cross an ocean. That’s a problem for navies, whose fighters and other airplanes don’t have that kind of range. Enter floating airports, AKA aircraft carriers. Those are big enough to circle the globe, and on September 24, 1960 they proved to be big enough for nuclear power, too — that’s the date the USS Enterprise was launched,.
Plenty of satellites and space probes are nuclear powered too — not reactors, just isotopes that serve as heat sources. But the probe that entered orbit around Mars on September 24, 2014 was powered by solar panels and lithium-ion batteries instead. It’s the Mars Orbiter Mission (Mangalyaan) launched by India, and it has several firsts. It’s India’s first interplanetary mission, making India the first Asian nation to reach Mars, and also making India the first country on earth to reach Mars on its first try.
Mangalyaan carries a load of scientific instruments to study the surface and atmosphere of Mars, including measuring the hydrogen in the planet’s atmosphere. The orbiter is still operating and sending back data, but we already know enough to conclude that dirigibles are probably not going to work very well there. Even if they do, a steam engine is out of the question. Even if the chimney points downward.
