Ankida experimental sailing vessel by Lila Lou London

Actually, prominent people thought the idea of commercial flight was viable long before it actually was viable. Major "establishment" figures such as Octave Chanute, Alexander Graham Bell, the head of the Smithsonian and the US Congress all got involved in heavier-than-air design and the German, British and other governments put huge sums into commercial lighter-than-air craft. In fact the odd thing was that the "establishment" took the Wright Brothers seriously when even their home-town newspaper ignored them.

The first promoted attempt at commercial flight (which occurred in the 1840s) was "crazy". They promised international flight via steam-powered aircraft but they hadn't worked out how to get it to take off or how to control itself when it did. As far as I know, the grandiose scheme added nothing to the later development of commercial flight.

What did kick off commercial flight was when a couple of brothers were fascinated by a little hand-held toy flying machine. That gave them a long interest in heavier-than-air flight. When one of them decided to get involved seriously, he did NOT take wild inspiration from the earliest attempts at commercial flight or design grandiose sketches - he wrote to the Smithsonian and asked for all the scientific and technical material on the subject that he had, so that he could add his own little bit to the puzzle.

The true story of the invention of heavier-than-air flight runs directly against the idea that impractical grandiose doodles lead to development. What lead to development was people who combined practical knowledge and a new concept with knowledge of the scientific and technical investigation and development that had gone before them. There's some great stuff about this in "First to Fly" and "The Bishop's Boys" (books about the Wrights) and in similar works about Santos Dumont and Hugo Eckener.

The same sort of thing seems to have happened in sailing. I've been lucky enough to know or correspond with some of the early major figures in modern hydrofoils, multis and windsurfers, and all of them had outstanding knowledge of the basic physics and technology. I don't think any of them were inspired by soap bubbles. Even in something as comparatively simple as the early development of shortboard high-performance windsurfers, just about everyone had a very solid grasp of the basic concepts and physics and what materials would allow them to do. They (we) all had dreams of futuristic craft and feats, but they rested on knowledge of the real world factors involved.

 

Great post.

 

Yep, SWATH is normally for comfort when it should be a pukefest onboard ... not going fast.

That said, this bubble tech actually may have the most to offer with a format that has the most surface area holding it back.

And it's a "machine that goes "ping"" too. That's gonna attract interest just for being edgy tech.

I personally think you could do a wave piercing cat with similar profile changing, and not leave a massive effervescent trail behind you that can proverbially be seen from orbit when dealing with a large boat ... but that's just me.

 

This luxury Swath, Douce France, is doing a steady 22 knots in only 28 knots of wind.
Fast enough for me.

http://www.sunreef-charter.com/img/yachts/douce_france/douce_france_main.jpg

 

You totally missed my point but whatever.

 

That is a swath?

 

Quotes from famous inventors
"Creativity is intelligence having fun."
"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."
"Play is the highest form of research."
"Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere."
"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious."
"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."
"There are no rules here--we're trying to accomplish something."
"The value of an idea lies in the using of it."
"Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That's not the place to become discouraged."
"Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out."
"The most dangerous notion a young man can acquire is that there is no more room for originality."
"All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed--only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle."

You are completely wrong about the vast majority of innovators and certainly the ones who were the greatest

 

Swath sailboat. Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull. This one is a beauty, but most, especcially the motor versions, are less elegant
.
http://www.boatinternational.com/yachts/yacht-design/are-swath-platforms-the-ideal-superyacht-design--715

 

I can't find any below waterline hull pics of the Douce France. It looks very normal to me, it looks great, does it have torpedo hulls?

Or does it possibly look something like this under the water? Disregard the dimensions, I know it's much larger.

 

I agree with you, jorgepease, the waterplane of that ship does not correspond to that of a swath. Regardless of the submerged part of the hulls, the waterplane is the traditional one of a catamaran.

 

Many thanks for your clear explanations and precisions.
The principle of tacking downwind is known since 1000 years by the Polynesians, at least end of 18th century by corsair ships, the cutters of mid 18th century have always done that (or the ship begins to have a rhythmic roll while being slower) and traditional fishing sailing boats except fishing with lines at very low speed in very light wind.
If you are old enough to have been a crew on hard driven racer cruisers in the 60ties, the memories of a 25 tons boat rolling 20-30 degrees each side while alternatively putting the mainsail boom and the spinnaker boom in the water before the sudden half turn to upwind with the mast almost horizontal and the spinnaker fishing in the water, plus crossing the paths of the other screaming competitors was synonymous of total panic. After you needed a change.
So when I saw the rendering dead downwind pic on such a big boat, I almost soiled my pants, a part being the slowest way to sail, it's also a very dangerous situation; just a wave, a little luff and one of the high tech telescopic booms hits the water...

 

@jorgepease
Nobody with some education has doubt that planes could fly. A lot of things heavier than air are been flying since millions of years. The problem resided in a better comprehension of the phenomenon and technology, not in the principle.
Idem for foils and many and many innovations.
Imagination is needed but without a solid background it's just a mania simply because the imaginative guy has no tools to make real the fruit of his imagination.
Let's take an extreme example; Relativity. The concept was in the air around 1900, some arrived very close to a theory like Poincaré but Einstein had in 1905 the imagination for the mental experiences, the knowledge for opening the theoretical path and describing it with the right mathematics. Thus transmissible to others who can verify the validity.
While going to the general relativity Einstein used a even wilder imagination as the phenomena are beyond common sense, but he acquired new mathematical tools; the tensorial mathematics invented by Levi Civita (These tensor are now widely used in topology maths and in engineering also, in 1910 they were a novelty in pure maths). Without the Levi Civita tensor the general relativity probably could not be formalized in an understandable (...) way.
So you have the child of a very wild imagination exploring the "never thought before" but oriented and made real by the knowledge. And the best proved beyond doubt. The knowledge permits to eliminate the false solutions, to see where the problems reside and to solve them. Thus to make the imagination real. And the tool of knowledge permits to go beyond the initial imagination. The black holes are an example.
Idem to design in the end of the fifties a SR71 plane, another extreme example...

Even in art you need knowledge, without a solid technical background there is not an opera magna. Look at a painting by Bosh the Elder, Miro or Klee, these paintings exists because these painters had the means of transcribing their imagination in a real painting. The same in sculpture, music, cinema etc...

The problem with the Ankida is there is maybe imagination but surely no knowledge. There are lethal flaws, not simply features asking for a technological improvement

 

Ok let me see if I can put this another way.

The laws of physics are still vastly theoretical. You will continue to innovate within the sphere of what is known while the next big innovation will come from people who ignore the laws of physics and take us to the next level, most probably by accident, but that's the way it goes. Over and over again, it happens this way.

As to your comment that planes were accepted as the future back then, you greatly diminish the commitment the Wright Bros. showed. An excerpt from Wiki -

In years to come Dayton newspapers would proudly celebrate the hometown Wright brothers as national heroes, but the local reporters somehow missed one of the most important stories in history as it was happening a few miles from their doorstep. James M. Cox, publisher at that time of the Dayton Daily News (later governor of Ohio and Democratic presidential nominee in 1920), expressed the attitude of newspapermen—and the public—in those days when he admitted years later, "Frankly, none of us believed it."[91]

And if your comparing everyone, the masses, to the visionaries back then, well I just don't comprehend what you are trying to say except that maybe you want to be a vissionary and that only trained people are vissionaries, I don't know. Gees, they didn't even have high school diplomas, so good luck with your innovating, this conversation is going nowhere, Im unscribing, Cheers

 

Tje laws of physics in technology are not pure speculative theory, they are tools used every day in a myriad of domains. We are not in the theory of chords or some parts of particles theory which are speculations waiting to be validated or rejected.

The words of Cox are those of an not enough informed man.

Lilienthal made 2000 flights betweem 1891 and 1896 with his gliders. He published a fundamental book in 1891. The Lilenthial polar of lift and drag is always used when comparing profiles.That was public with pics in the European newspapers.

Paper and bamboo unmanned gliders were flying for about 40 years on 1903. Propellers were known and used with rubber bands as engines. Yes free flight planes with rubber engines ware used well before the first official manned powered flight. You could buy them around 1885-1890 if I remember well in London and Paris if rich enough.

So the Wright Bros beneficed of the invention of usable gas engines and from the former flying gliders unmanned or not. The principles of sustentation, stability and control in the 3 dimensions were known.

The dangers of stalling, ie losing lift by too much angle) were known. Cody of the famous kites explained it very well, Lilenthial also, the poor guy killed himself later in a stall of his glider in 1896.

In 1890 Clement Ader financed by the French Army had an unmanned plane the Eole which made a brief jump powered by a steam engine.
Gustave Eiffel (the same od the Eiffel Tower) was designing and published profiles around 1900. He created the first official laboratory of aerodynamics with a wind tunnel as we now see them in 1909.

The Wright knew it, as that was public and in all the numerous publications of the numerous aviation societies. The word avion (plane in French) and aviation were coined by Ader in 1890 and used widely in Europe around 1900.
So around 1890-1900 many people were working in the problem.

The problem to solve was to get an engine light and powerful enough installed in a controllable cell and to make it fly with a pilot. Nobody educated doubt in 1900 that one next day an heavier than air will fly by its own means.
That was a extremely difficult task with the technology and knowledge of the day, The immense merit of the Wright Bros was to solve it. The problem solved by the Wright was not a theoretical one, it was a practical one, and they showed a lot of imagination and ingenuity.

But the plane did not appeared suddenly from the vacuum as the American journalistic myth wanted to make it believe.

No, no isolated poor boys in the middle of the prairie had a red blooded yankee trait of genius and against all invented the plane.
They were self educated guys, engineers by mind, very well informed of what was succeeding and they methodically searched and found the solution. Only intelligence and knowledge are needed not diplomas. They even took a big pack of patents, and that took too much time, in fact years. Meantime the others were progressing and as typical Europeans did not bother to take brevets or having secrecy.

When touring in Europe in 1908, it appeared to the Wright Bros that they had no chance to have the exclusivity and to defend the patents as there were many precedents of identical solutions years before.

The very first public (ie in presence of a crowd in a public meeting) flight of a Wright plane, the Flyer III, was in France in 1908. All the former flights of a Wright plane are only documented by witnesses and pics. The flights were private and secret until 1908.
The Flyer III was already totally obsolete in 1908 when it appeared in public. A few months later on 1909 the channel was crossed in a flight of about 46 km in 35 minutes by Bleriot on the Bleriot XI.

Facts are stubborn, but that do not retire any merit to the Wright Bros. They did it. And made a lot of money making planes later, so nobody died poor and forgotten.
I see them as consenting victims of the fabrication of a legend. They are not holy icons of the Golden Legend of Inventions, just tenacious and smart guys.

Cheers.

 

Jorge, you completely missed the point by deciding for some reason that I was against imagination. I'm not. What I am saying is that imagination that does not rest on understanding is of little use.

It is simply incorrect to say that big innovations, in sailing at least, comes from people who ignore the laws of physics. Modern windsurfer was invented by a computer engineer and a NACA aeronautics engineer. The first modern beach cat was created by a family who later broke the sailing speed record and who had a very scientific approach (one was an engineer). The modern breakthroughs that lead to the modern sailing hydrofoils were all created by engineers and trained boat-and car-builders. They all know the laws of physics intimately, and that is a simple and undeniable fact that is obvious to anyone who has ever talked or corresponded with them.

I already noted, in post 46, that the experts believed in the Wrights long before the newspapers did. The issue with the Wright's local newspapers has been examined in some detail by people like Tobin. What is shows is that the experts like Chanute - one of the leaders in the field of engineering in the USA - were far ahead of the journalists and the general public in their appreciation of the Wrights, because as early as 1901 Wilbur had been invited to give talks to engineers and had written papers in engineering journals about heavier-than-air flight. Alexander Graham Bell's writings show that he believed in the Wrights far earlier than Cox and his cohorts; see for example Tobin's book on the Wrights where this is all given in great detail.

You can't use a remark by an untrained journalist to show that the experts all ignored the Wrights, because the plain, simple and well documented proof is that some of the great inventors and engineers DID believe in the Wrights years before the press and before they achieved their powered flight. In fact some of the very greatest offered them financial, moral and intellectual assistance at a time when untrained people were sneering or ignoring them.

I'm not formally trained myself, by the way, and nothing I said indicates that I think only formally trained people are visionaries. But if someone has an idea that shows both a lack of technical and scientific method AND a complete lack of understanding of the practicalities of big-boat sailing then it is hard to see why we should see it as some sort of blinding vision. Any one of us can think of wilder impractical ideas than this boat every morning.

As regards your quotes about imagination; yes, of course imagination is a vital and powerful tool. I never said it wasn't. But there's a huge difference between valuable and productive imagination and the sort of soap-bubble imagination that ignores basic physics and basic sailing technique.


PS - According to the Quote Investigator site's research, that quote "creativity is intelligence having fun" wasn't from the famous inventor Albert Einstein, but an advertising man, Joey Reiman; see

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/02/fun/#more-15588

The same source says that the quote "Play is the highest form of research" was also not created by Einstein. Einstein actually said " “The desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of a vague play with basic ideas. This combinatory or associative play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought”. Einstein's true quote has a deeper message and brings logic and "basic ideas" into the picture.

"Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere" was probably not said by Einstein, according to "The ultimate quotable Einstein"

As noted earlier, a very relevant and real Einstein quote came from when he designed a disastrous airfoil by failing to research how they worked. "This is what happens to a man who think a lot but reads little" he wrote, adding that he was "ashamed of his folly". It's a fairly well attested quote accepted by his biographers.