[An Engineering Correspondent], ‘The Design of Aeroplanes’

In 1881, the Scottish anatomist, aviation pioneer and museum curator James Bell Pettigrew published an article entitled ‘Flight Natural and Artificial’. After a long analysis of the mechanics of flight and the potentials of manned flight, he simply concluded that in the nineteenth century the impossibilities of today are the possibilities of tomorrow. The rapid development, with the spur of war and the need for supremacy in the field, clearly involved developments in the design of the components, and the complete aircraft and the ensuing results meant that a degree of standardisation in basic designs was inevitable as the novelty of experimentation became more serious. When the design of a machine, be it bicycle, motor-car, or aeroplane, reaches anything like a fixed type, it ceases to possess that degree of interest for the engineer which is associated with its development from a crude and faulty piece of mechanism to something like a finished piece of work.