Contemporary with the Wright brother’s famous engine builder, Charles Edward Taylor, was less recognized engineer and mechanic, Charles Mathews Manly. In 1903 Manly built a successful aircraft engine which could have powered the Wright brother’s flight for miles instead of feet. His story is short, but “Into his 51 years,” wrote a colleague, “Manly crowded a wealth of pioneer engineering.”
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Born in 1876, Manly’s childhood appears to be a linear track toward academia. He attended both the University of Missouri and Furman College, continuing on to Cornell University. At age 22, Manly was completing his studies in mechanical engineering when Samuel Pierpont Langley [1834-1906], secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, chose him to be his assistant for a new project to create a manned flying machine. In exchange, Manly was assured to receive his degree from Cornell in absentia. The idea of human flight in 1898 was considered so bizarre that only the prestige of America’s largest scientific institution allowed the project to be taken seriously. Manly’s response was immediate, enthusiastic, and for Langley, very fortunate. It is doubtful either Manly or Langley fathomed the intellectual, psychological, and often physically dangerous challenges to come.
Langley, a noted scientist and the third secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (in 1887), had experimented with small models of flying aircraft using rubber bands and later, models powered by miniature steam engines. He tested his inventions from boat-like structures on the nearby Potomac River and, in 1896 one drone flew nearly a mile gaining the attention of the U.S. War Department, then interested in the possibility of military air machines operated at human hands. In 1898 Langley entered into a government contract to build a flying machine funded by a grant for $50,000. Langley called it the Aerodrome (after the Greek words, “air runner.”)
Langley’s Aerodrome included a specially designed houseboat from which the aircraft could be catapulted. The Aerodrome was constructed and tested in the Smithsonian’s shop, overseen by Langley, often an impatient and irritable man made more so by his unique responsibilities. In 1898, unable to find a suitable engine to convert for his use, Langley contracted with automobile inventor Stephen Marius Balzer of New York to create a gasoline-driven engine of 12 hp weighing no more than 100 pounds. Langley’s Aerodrome was originally designed to utilize two 12-hp engines with a total of 24 hp. After almost two years, Balzer was near bankruptcy and his engine design was inoperable. At Balzer’s New York shop, Manly assessed the failure and convinced Langley to retrieve the non-functional engine for parts.
Langley and Manly immediately traveled to Europe in a futile search of a foreign engine builder. While there, Manly attended the 1900 Paris Exposition and was so encouraged by the advancement of technology that he convinced Langley to assign him the redesign of Balzer’s engine. At age 24, the “assistant” became the inventor of the Aerodrome’s power plant. Instead of two engines, Manly’s concept soon became one engine of higher horsepower.
Manly makes it work
By September of 1900, Manly had reworked the Balzer engine into an “experimental engine” which ran for three to four minutes, when cooled with water-soaked cloth. The engine produced 18 ½ hp, at 715 rpm, weighing 108 pounds. Further re-design and new technical problems required materials difficult to obtain. He later wrote, “At the time very little was known about the ‘proper way of constructing’ an engine and what work had been done was jealously guarded against patent theft by the automobile industry.” Even with ample funding, his progress was nevertheless impeded because parts such as spark plugs were difficult to find in 1902-1903. The Smithsonian published Manly’s configuration drawings and his summary describes the details of his construction challenges:
“. . . it was impossible to procure any wire which had been properly insulated to withstand the high voltages necessary for the connections between the high-tension side of the spark coil and the secondary distributor, and from the secondary distributor to the spark plugs in the cylinders . . . it was finally necessary to insulate these wires by covering them with several thicknesses of ordinary rubber tube of different diameters telescoped over each other.”
While solving small problems, Manly also made big advances, which were uncommonly imaginative, practical, and sustaining. He later described the (then) customary use of a separate spark coil and a separate contact maker for every cylinder of an engine. To eliminate the added weight and difficulty of adjustments, Manly designed a “new and valuable multiple-sparking arrangement whereby only one battery, one coil, and one contact maker were utilized for causing the spark in all five cylinders, a small commutating arrangement in the high-tension circuit distributing the sparks to the proper cylinders at the proper time.”
Small problems were plentiful. Manly wrote:
“Soot formed on the porcelain and thereby caused a short circuit, preventing the plug from working properly. This was overcome by extending the metal portion of the plug for some distance into the cylinder . . . three-quarters of an inch beyond the end of the porcelain insulator. The terminal which passed through the insulator was also extended for . . . half an inch beyond the porcelain and bent to a proper extent to co-act with a piece of platinum wire inserted in the interior wall of the plug which formed the other terminal.”
Manly designed two dynamometers in the Smithsonian shop to test his engine which was encountering major difficulties with overheating. By this time the original horsepower concept had increased (as did the size of the Aerodrome frame and propellers) to 40 hp. Every carburetor tested proved unacceptable, flooding with gasoline. Manly resolved this by filling the fuel tank with “loosely packed lumps of gasoline-soaked, tupelo wood.”
By December of 1901 the power plant configuration was a “five-cylinder engine – arranged radially on a central drum . . . with only one crank pin.” He ultimately coaxed 51 hp from the engine which weighed (he notes, “with water”) about 207 pounds; “without flywheels, a little over 191 pounds.”
The first successful radial aircraft engine
Successful engine tests in January of 1902, included Manly’s starting mechanism design enabling the aviator to bring the power plant to life mid-air. This manipulation was improbable due to the attention required of the aviator (situated in the Aerodrome’s “aviator car”) to control wing, rudder, and tail; nevertheless, the starter was routinely utilized for endurance testing. The Aerodrome was tested while hung from the ceiling on springs, 10 feet above the floor. Every known test element was forced upon the engine, including 30-mph wind. At one point a propeller careened off the Aerodrome frame crashing to the floor. It was no wonder Manly found few volunteers for work, which he conceded was “dangerous.”
Whereas Manly’s engine was proven to be dependable beyond expectations, the Langley’s airframe was problematic and ultimately doomed. The wooden frame was engineered without the benefit of manned glider experiments which could have resulted in improved calculations for structural strength and flexibility. Based solely upon his small scale models, Langley’s design was flimsy, if not impressively large. The completed Aerodrome was 52 feet in length, affixed with tandem/staggered wings spanning 48 feet, two pusher propellers, and sat 11 feet off the ground. It weighed 750 pounds (including Manly at the controls).
On Oct. 7, 1903, and again on Dec. 8, 1903, the Aerodrome was propelled off the houseboat platform only to immediately buckle and plunge into the river below, fortunately without drowning Manly. The weak structure of the Aerodrome was severely damaged, as was the reputation of Langley’s experiment at the expense of government funding. Just 10 days later, Orville and Wilbur Wright’s successful flights at Kitty Hawk caused Langley’s work to be dismissed as an irrelevant failure.
Manly rightfully wanted his successful radial engine displayed to illuminate the advances gained by Langley’s Aerodrome project. In 1904, Manly’s engine was the only entry to qualify in the St. Louis Exposition contest for the lightest engine with the highest horsepower. Causing great disappointment to Manly, the contest was canceled due to lack of competition.
The inventor
Leaving Washington, D.C., in 1904, Manly moved to New York and set up his own consulting firm, continuing to develop inventions in the field of his new passion, aeronautics. As vice president and chief engineer between 1906 and 1915, he designed and patented more than 40 products, including the Manly Drive, “a hydraulic variable-speed, power-transmitting mechanism.”
As world war loomed in Europe the German government offered him “practically unlimited salary” to assist them in the development of various war machines, which he refused. Sympathetic to the Allied cause, he instead worked first for the British War Office and then for the United States. He was hired as a consultant and later as chief inspection engineer and ultimately assistant general manager of the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company.
In 1918, he was one of 14 delegates participating in the International Aircraft Standards Conference which was formed to promote the fledgling aviation industry for the purpose of creating military machines. By 1919 Manly was the president of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). He was an enthusiastic supporter and early member of the Aero Club of America and a representative of the American Engineering Standards Committee (the forerunner of the current, American National Standards Institute).
While still active as an engineering consultant, Charles Mathews Manly died of a heart attack in 1927. Stunned by the sudden loss, his colleagues at SAE created the annual Manly Memorial Medal for the best documentation of “a theory, design, or construction on aerospace engines, parts, components, or accessories.”
In prospective
Michael Aten, an engineer for the Goodrich Corporation, has most recently been assigned to the nacelle design for the latest generation of Airbus aircraft. In his spare time, Aten has hand-built a museum quality replica of the Wrights’ 1902 glider, giving him valuable historic perspective. “Manly’s engine was a remarkable feat for an engine weight of 200 pounds,” says Aten. “His design was far in advance of the Wright brothers’ in-line four-cylinder engine of the same weight which produced approximately 12 hp.” Several models of Taylor’s engine have been made but there is only one operational replica of Manly’s engine. Built by the Hay family of machinists in Wisconsin, it has often been exhibited at EAA’s Oshkosh AirVenture. The original 1903 Aerodrome is on display at the National Air & Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy facility and its engine resides at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.
During the 1920s the Smithsonian described the Aerodrome as “The first man-carrying airplane in the world capable of sustained flight,” to which Orville Wright protested was not so, unless one considered six seconds of free-fall to be “sustained flight.” The Aerodrome continued to illicit controversy when in 1932 the Smithsonian bestowed the Langley Medal posthumously to Manly, emphasizing his work on the 1903 engine. Balzer argued that he deserved recognition for his contribution as well. Eventually, the Smithsonian displayed the “Manly engine” with a new sign captioned: “The Balzer-Manly Engine.”
In later years Manly felt compelled to defend the shadow of failure which fell upon Langley’s Aerodrome of 1902-1903. Had Langley lived longer, Manly maintained “he would have gone on with his experiments undiscouraged by these accidents in launching.” As for Manly, historian John David Anderson recently wrote (with a nod to Balzer added herewith) that “Manly’s engine . . . appears to be the first aircraft radial engine in history, and certainly the first successful one . . . the engine was in no way responsible for [the Aerodrome’s] failures.”
In 1905, while making test flights at Huffman Prairie in Ohio, the Wrights were engaged in conversation with a curious visitor who asked intelligent questions and politely put aside his camera when told he could not photograph the Wright aeroplane. It was years later when Orville Wright recognized his visitor from a photograph as Charles Manly, who had come to witness the flight of man.
Charles M. Manly did not require a confirming photograph. He had known it was possible all along.
For further information about Balzer, Langley, and Manly, and photographs of the Aerodrome see the following web site: http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Prehistory/Last_Decade/PH5.htm
