Of Horses and Biplanes

In the early years of the last century, men and women were confronted by many different kinds of machinery for the first time. Aircraft were a tremendous unknown, but pilots quickly learned to adapt. Even though they were flying hundreds and thousands of feet in the air, and had to learn to think and act in three dimensions, one is struck by the extent that attitudes towards the horse seem to have carried over into early aviation. It is notable that large numbers of the aces of the First World War were former cavalrymen, so this is perhaps to be expected, but it is driven home forcefully by the memoir, The Red Battle Flyer, of the Red Baron, Freiherr Manfred von Richtofen.

The early pages are filled with Richtofen's exploits steeple chasing with various horses prior to the War. He wrote of his horses and his planes in much the same way, sometimes giving the machine almost animate qualities, such as this passage:

I was surrounded by an inky blackness. Beneath me the trees bent down in the gale. Suddenly I saw right in front of me a wooded height. I could not avoid it. My Albatros managed to take it. I was able to fly only in a straight line. Therefore I had to take every obstacle that I encountered. My flight became a jumping competition purely and simply.  [Emphasis added.]

 The metaphors he uses throughout the book are all of the chase and the hunt. One feels that he and his contemporaries created a relationship with their machines similar to the ones that they had previously had with their horses. (It is striking to note, that one of the arguments against the introduction of enclosed cockpits in the thirties was that the pilots could not clearly hear the engines; they were using all of their senses, literally flying by the seat of their pants.)

We seem always to have treated our machines, at least the complex ones, as if they are alive. While we may logically know they are not alive, the intuitive and imaginative portions of the mind do treat them as if they are. Sailing ships were virtually living machines, and were certainly treated as such by their crews. Like early aircraft, they had to be operated by feel, sight, and sound. In a sense, they spoke to the whole person. This is something we are losing today as we come to rely more and more on sight in operating our digital machines.

In a previous post, I suggested that clocks created a different understanding of time, one actually rooted in the structure of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. We cannot fully recover the sense of time our pre-fourteenth century ancestors had. I am also suggesting that as we move away from the analog feedback that machines have given us in the past, and replace them with digital readouts and displays, even if they mimic the old dials and gauges, we are less-and-less able to experience machines in the way our predecessors did, even a century ago. In dealing with the past, we need to keep this in mind.

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The quote is taken from Manfred von Richtofen, The Red Battle Flyer, trans. J. Ellis Barker, 1918, p. 94.