by Phil Mason
History’s accolade for inventing powered, sustained and controlled heavier-than-air flight would go elsewhere. But for Pilcher’s infectious wish to share his dreams with others, it would almost certainly have been very different and it would have been the Eynsford Hawk, not Kitty Hawk, the site of the Wrights’ first powered flight in North Carolina, that would occupy premier place in the annals of aviation.
As if to wallow in Britain’s closeness to fame, in 2003, to mark the centenary of the first manned flight, enthusiasts built a replica of the Hawk. It flew for 38 seconds – three times longer than the Wrights’ first effort.
A computer reconstruction in 2003 of the Wrights’ first flight to mark the 100th anniversary revealed that the flight came perilously close to failure. It had worked only because of a combination of fortunate weather and Wilbur Wright getting his sums wrong.
The reconstruction had been ordered to satisfy the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ health and safety requirements for flying an exact replica of the Wright plane on the centenary. Analysts discovered that the flight was saved from stalling only because of the higher efficiency of the propeller than Wilbur had calculated, coupled with winds blowing from the right direction and at precisely the right speed.
The Wright Flyer was 75lb heavier than originally designed, but was saved by the unexpected performance from the propeller. As a result, the replica was required to fly significantly faster than the 30mph achieved in the real flight – to prevent it from catastrophically stalling.
In the event, bad weather and high winds prevented the replica achieving any lift-off at all at the ceremonial commemoration on 17 December 2003.
Ralph Alpher, the American physicist behind the Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe, became a forgotten man in the annals of scientific discovery all because his boss thought up a clever joke.
In April 1948, he had become the first to set out the mathematical model that showed how the Big Bang led to the reactions that formed all the chemical elements. He enjoyed fleeting fame, and his supervisor at George Washington University, George Gamow, set him to produce a second paper – on how radiation from the Big Bang should still be detectable – a few months later. Although Alpher did all the work, Gamow, a noted physicist himself, thought it would be amusing to add his name and that of another famous scientist in the field, Hans Bethe, producing an authors’ line-up of Alpher, Bethe, Gamow – a pun on the Greek letters alpha, beta, gamma – highly appropriate, he thought, for a work which described the beginnings of the universe.
Unfortunately for Alpher, because both the others were world-renowned names, the scientific community assumed that it was they who had done most of the research. Alpher’s starring role in the discovery was rapidly forgotten as a result. When, in 1964, two astronomers detected the radiation Alpher had predicted, confirming the Big Bang theory, they won the Nobel Prize. Alpher’s contribution was completely ignored. He bitterly tried to stake his claim for recognition, but to no avail.
By then, the disappointed Alpher had long left the academic science field and spent most of the rest of his career in the research and development department of the General Electric company. He died in obscurity in 2007.
James Chadwick, one of the world’s foremost pioneers of nuclear science, became a physicist by mistake. He intended to be a mathematician but as a 16-year-old joined the wrong queue at Manchester University in 1907 and found himself enrolled in physics instead.
He stayed because he was impressed by the tutor who interviewed him: Ernest Rutherford, who would go on to work out the structure of the atom. Chadwick would work under Rutherford for much of his career, uncovering the fundamentals of atomic structures, and discovering the neutron particle in 1932. During the Second World War he led the British team of scientists working on the American project to build the atomic bomb.
And all because he once stood in the wrong line.
It was to be one of Rutherford’s mistakes – and an enforced wait at traffic lights – that would lead to the discovery of the darkest secret of the atom. The concept of a nuclear chain reaction, which led to the development of the atomic bomb, came to Hungarian scientist Leó Szilárd as he stood waiting for the lights to change on a London street on the morning of 12 September 1933.
Szilárd had just read a report in that day’s Times of a lecture by Rutherford to the annual meeting of the British Association. The pioneer of understanding the mysteries of the atom had dismissed Szilárd’s idea of the possibilities of releasing the energy from atoms. Rutherford had called it ‘moonshine’. Irritated by this, and the rain that had just started to fall while he waited to cross Southampton Row, the spark of inspiration hit him. He conceived how one atom bombarding another could release two particles which would go on to release four … As he crossed the road, he later recalled, the notion of nuclear fission was laid out before him in his mind.
Szilárd patented the idea the following year, but chose the wrong element to experiment with. He failed to produce a successful chain reaction in practice. He teamed up with Enrico Fermi and the pair discovered in 1939 that uranium was the perfect material for producing easily released particles. They went on to create the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in December 1942 as part of the American Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb.
Robert FitzRoy, captain of the Beagle survey ship which would take Charles Darwin on his, and science’s, epoch-making voyage, nearly refused to accept Darwin because of the shape of his nose.
FitzRoy was an amateur adherent of phrenology, the belief that a person’s character is revealed in the shape of their head. He was suspicious at first of Darwin’s rather broad, squat, nose, which he thought reflected a lazy disposition and a weak character – hardly the right fit for such a prolonged and lonely journey where the pair would be the only two gentlemen aboard. But as he dined with Darwin at that first meeting, he relented and offered him the berth.
Darwin had still not been FitzRoy’s first choice. He only got his chance because the captain’s preferred selection dropped out. He had also had to overcome resolute opposition to the voyage from his own father, who wanted him to go into the church. ‘You will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family’ and the voyage would be ‘a useless undertaking’ were his verdicts. But he was persuaded by the rest of the family to concede.
As he sailed, Darwin could justifiably feel that he had already overcome three small but potentially fatal obstacles to his hoped-for future.
Hubert Cecil Booth, the Gloucester-born inventor of the vacuum cleaner, nearly killed himself with his first experiment to test his concept before he had ever put together a working model.
He was inspired in 1901 to ‘suck, not blow’ by seeing a demonstration of an American machine for cleaning train carriages which used a high pressure air jet to blow dust out of fabrics. In a restaurant afterwards, it struck him that a more effective method would be to try to suck the dust up. He put his handkerchief on an old chair and breathed in heavily. He nearly choked to death on the dust.
Within months, the vacuum cleaner was born.
Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who is credited with coming up with the idea of global communications through orbiting satellites, made no financial gain from his breakthrough thought since he wrote about his notion in a magazine article in Wireless World in October 1945 rather than taking out a patent for his innovation. He may have deprived himself of millions of pounds from royalties.
The Hubble space telescope, launched in 1990 at a cost of over $2 billion was quickly discovered to have a major problem – its pictures were blurred. The distortion was found to have been caused by a speck of paint on an optical measuring rod during the polishing of the primary mirror. This had led to the lens being 0.002 millimetres too flat – one fiftieth the width of a human hair.
It made all the difference though. It would take three years, an $86 million repair bill and a Shuttle mission in 1993 to put it rig
ht.
Hubble was not space’s first catastrophic glitch caused by a minuscule oversight. NASA’s Mariner I mission to Venus in June 1962 had to be aborted when the rocket went off course four minutes after take-off. The investigation discovered that the cause of the failure was the omission of a single hyphen in the flight computer’s software program. The punctuation error had cost NASA $18.5 million (about $400 million in today’s values).
Nearly 40 years later, it seemed that elementary slipups could still happen. NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter was lost in September 1999 as it headed into a far lower orbit than planned which led it to burning up in the atmosphere. An investigation discovered that computer software written by separate parts of the mission team were in different units of measurement for key navigation operations. The propulsion team had used English imperial units (feet, inches) to specify thrust while the navigation team had used the data as if it was in the metric system.
It led the probe to be 100 kilometres lower in orbit than intended. The mission had cost $125 million. Said NASA’s associate administrator, Edward Weiler, ‘People sometimes make errors.’
NASA’s $260 million three-year Genesis project to collect space dust from the Sun on wafer-thin glass platelets appeared to end catastrophically when the capsule’s parachute failed to work on re-entry in September 2004. Instead of a smooth landing, it crashed into the Utah desert at 100mph. It was later discovered that the parachute had not deployed because the deceleration sensors, which should have triggered it, had been designed upside down.
On opening the samples, however, scientists later reassured the world that they appeared to have survived the impact.
The apparently smooth and trouble-free first manned landing on the Moon in July 1969 was in fact plagued with last-second computer glitches that nearly turned the mission into a disaster. Two unexplained computer warnings in three minutes as the Apollo 11 lander dropped to 2,500ft above the Moon’s surface caused Neil Armstrong to take manual control of the landing much earlier than scheduled.
Although Mission Control told the astronauts to ignore the warnings – they were later found to be indicating a general overloading of systems – they did affect the drift of the descent and the lunar lander was nearly four miles further on than it should have been, and only two miles within the limit set for a mandatory abort.
As Armstrong struggled at 200ft to find a safe new landing spot, he had barely 60 seconds of descent fuel left. Had he run out, the landing would have been too heavy for the fragile craft and if they were not killed in the impact they would not have been able to take off again from a damaged platform.
Exactly how much fuel remained when he did land was never determined. According to co-pilot Buzz Aldrin, his instruments showed just 10 seconds’ worth of fuel were left. After their four-and-a quarter day odyssey to get there, they had had at the end barely a few heartbeats to get it right first time.
The reason for the computer overload was discovered during the astronauts’ stay on the surface. A radar on the lander, used for tracking the orbiting command module, had been left on automatic, meaning that the computer was using valuable memory analysing data from itself. Mission Control realised the mistake just 30 minutes before the lander was due to blast back off into orbit and instructed the crew to turn it to manual. Had it been left on as before, they would have encountered the same computer failings during the even more hazardous re-docking manoeuvre that could have ended in a catastrophic contrast so soon after the success of the landing itself.
NASA intended an elegantly symbolic ending to the mission, but was thwarted by earthly political rivalries. They planned to signify the completion of the historic pledge by President Kennedy in 1961 to achieve a Moon landing before the decade was out by having the Apollo 11 crew picked up by the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy. But Richard Nixon’s deep-seated jealousy of his now dead rival intervened and he vetoed the plan. He insisted on sending a different carrier, the USS Hornet.
Few of the other Moon missions escaped hitches that almost brought the flights to terminal disaster. Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice within 16 seconds on launch. The first discharged right through the spacecraft and on to the launch tower 6,000ft below. The second caused the command module’s entire navigation system to go down, and disconnected the ship’s batteries from the power system. According to one account, Pete Conrad, the flight commander, relayed to Mission Control ‘in one breath, the longest list of malfunctions ever heard’. When they reached orbit, it took two and a half hours of checks before the flight was given the OK to continue.
When on the Moon, Conrad’s partner Al Bean ruined all television coverage of man’s second expedition when he pointed the camera into the sun and destroyed it. The only coverage of the mission was by radio and that did much to turn off the American public. The only photographic record comes from the stills taken by the astronauts themselves. (And they managed to leave a roll of pictures behind on the surface by mistake, having forgotten to pack it back on board.)
Conrad could have taken one of the most intriguing shots ever had his practical joke come off. He had smuggled an automatic timer for his stills camera on to the mission without the knowledge of Mission Control. He and Bean planned to take a picture of them both posing tourist-style in front of the lander. Conrad said he could not wait for the inevitable question asked by those back on Earth, ‘Who took the snap?’ He had hidden the timer in the rock box used to collect samples, and when it came to the moment to mount the shot, he could not find it amidst the stones. Realising he could only find it by emptying out the whole box, the pair decided to abandon the prank.
The explosion in the oxygen tank which crippled Apollo 13 was caused by an oversight in the design of a thermostat on a heater which was equipped to run on only 28 volts, like the rest of the Apollo craft when it had first been designed. When the program upgraded the entire system to run at 65 volts, all components were upgraded to take the higher voltage – except someone forgot the heater. The thermostat was meant to keep the temperature of the oxygen tank at 80 degrees Fahrenheit. When it came into operation, the extra voltage melted its contacts shut and allowed the temperature in the tanks to rise to 1,000 degrees, cracking most of the insulation. No one on the ground knew because the controller’s gauge at Mission Control only went up to 85 degrees. As the astronauts activated the fan for the tanks to do a regular control procedure, an electrical spark ignited the exposed plastic covering the wiring and, fuelled by the oxygen, caused the explosion.
The Apollo 14 command module had so much difficulty docking with the lunar module as it tried to pluck it from its launch berth inside the Saturn V rocket, that the mission was nearly abandoned. After five attempts, and an hour and half of consultation with Mission Control, the two craft still failed to lock. The crew even planned to depressurise their module, open the docking hatch and drag the two craft together by hand. Eventually, they forced a firm contact by firing their thrusters as they docked to increase the pressure. It appeared to shake lose whatever had blocked the locking devices. It was barely an hour before the massive stage of the rocket would have vented its spare fuel – a procedure that required the command module to be a considerable distance away. It did, however, leave an anxious pall over the whole mission. No one knew what the fault had been, and they would have to repeat the docking after the Moon landing for a safe return.
On the same mission, as the lander was just 90 minutes from the Moon’s surface, a faulty signal from the Mission Abort button came on. The astronauts were used to malfunctioning alarms, but this was potentially fatal. As soon as the descent engines had been fired, as they were about to do, activation of the alarm again would automatically abort the landing. It required programmers on the ground to rewrite the computer’s software to instruct the system to ignore any signal from the errant alarm. The necessary changes were developed, signalled to the module and keyed in just 10 minutes before the descent engines had to be ignited or the mission ab
orted. Even as they neared the surface, a further potentially fatal problem occurred. By 32,000ft, the lunar lander’s ground radar had still not started working. Without it, it was impossible to judge a landing. Mission rules specified that if it was not working by 10,000ft, it was a mandatory abort. On the advice of Mission Control, they effectively unplugged the system and plugged it back in again. They were under 20,000ft – and seconds from an abort – when the radar began operating.
Apollo 16 had separated and the lunar lander was en route to the surface when the orbiting command module’s engine failed, threatening the mission. In order to ensure that the crew had a means of getting home, if the command module engine failed they would have to use the lunar module engine to fire them back to Earth. Flight rules dictated that the lander had to cease its descent and return to orbit with the command module until the problem was resolved. If it was not within 10 hours, the entire landing was off as they would be out of range of the planned landing site. The fault was rectified after six, giving them just sufficient time to complete a successful descent.
The main experiment on Apollo 16 was one to measure heat flow under the Moon’s surface, vital to geologists for understanding how the Moon had been formed. The first attempt to run the experiment had been lost when Apollo 13 failed to reach the Moon, so NASA were doubly expectant this time. It carried a price tag of $1m. As Mission Commander John Young set up the base station, he failed to notice that the cable linking buried sensors to the device had looped around his boot. It was clearly visible to the ground audience watching on television, but before Mission Control could alert him he had hopped away, ripping out the line from the experiment and ruining this one too.
