No. 21

thingiverse

Before any Batplane or Batarang took to the skies of Gotham City around 1939, another bat-like craft soared through Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1901. Sharp-eyed readers will recall from aviation history that the Wright Brothers made their historic flight from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903, so it's possible this Connecticut craft was a glider. However, this event in 1901 was actually a heavier-than-air powered flight conducted by Gustave Whitehead. Gustave Whitehead or Gustav Weisskopf as he was known in Germany was born in Leutershausen, Germany in 1874. After a brief seafaring career, young Whitehead immigrated to the United States in 1894. He arrived in Bridgeport, Connecticut via a Pittsburgh mining job in 1900, and it's here that Whitehead began his flight experiments. In the summer of 1901, Whitehead built and flew a bat-winged aeroplane he called No. 21. There are no photographs of this flight or any good evidence that it could fly. All we have to support the Whitehead claim is a handful of signed "eyewitness" affidavits that are questionable at best. Oddly, Whitehead was able to take two known photographs of himself and his infant daughter posing next to No. 21 on the ground but not in flight. Additionally, there are no known photographs of the inside of this craft or its dual engines. Granted, the Wright Brothers' inaugural flight has been difficult to reproduce today, but there are photographs as well as other corroborated evidence that support their claim. Conversely, Whitehead's flights are undocumented and ridiculous in their performance specifications. According to Whitehead, he claimed in 1902 that he had made four flights on August 14, 1901 at a maximum distance of one and a half miles and an airspeed of 70 miles per hour. The Wright Brothers, on the other hand, made four flights on December 17, 1903 at a maximum distance of 852 feet and a measured ground speed of 10.3 miles per hour. Fast forward to today and there are two Whitehead No. 21 reproductions that have been flown in Bridgeport, Connecticut and Leutershausen, Germany. These models can be built as either static or operable configurations with the biggest difference being the motor propulsion system. To build your No. 21, start by covering the model with tissue using a glue stick to apply a thin layer of adhesive to the plastic frame. Once the glue has dried, the tissue should be shrunken to its final surface finish smoothness by dampening it with water. When building the motor, elastic thread is used for the drive belts that move between the pulleys. Thrust bearings and thrust washers (or beads) need to be added between the plastic bearing blocks and the moving pulleys. Finally, axles for the pulleys and rubber hooks for the propellers must be shaped from .032 music wire. The completed model can be rigged with thread and needle. Small holes have been incorporated into the wing ribs and tail surface support boom that serve as glue points for holding the thread taut. Small brass washers should be used for collecting each wing's upper and lower surface rigging together prior to attachment to the main mast and the underside of the hull, respectively. The line drawing of Whitehead can be 3D printed as a lithophane by loading it into the open source slicing/printing program Cura. Change the printing height (Z layer) to 4 mm and keep the other parameters at their default settings.