reak' machines fell out by the wayside, the pioneer designers of those
days learnt by a process of trial and error the right principles to
follow and gradually succeeded in getting their ideas crystallised.

In connection with stability mention must be made of a machine which
was evolved in the utmost secrecy by Mr J. W. Dunne in a remote part
of Scotland under subsidy from the War office. This type, which was
constructed in both monoplane and biplane form, showed that it was
in fact possible in 1910 and 1911 to design an aeroplane which could
definitely be left to fly itself in the air. One of the Dunne machines
was, for example flown from Farnborough to Salisbury Plain without any
control other than the rudder being touched; and on another occasion it
flew a complete circle with all controls locked automatically assuming
the correct bank for the radius of turn. The peculiar form of wing used,
the camber of which varied from the root to the tip, gave rise however,
to a certain loss in efficiency, and there was also a difficulty in the
pilot assuming adequate control when desired. Other machines designed to
be stable--such as the German Etrich and the British Weiss gliders and
Handley-Page monoplanes--were based on the analogy of a wing attached
to a certain seed found in Nature (the 'Zanonia' leaf), on the righting
effect of back-sloped wings combined with upturned (or 'negative') tips.
Generally speaking, however, the machines of the 1909-1912 period relied
for what automatic stability they had on the principle of the dihedral
angle, or flat V, both longitudinally and laterally. Longitudinally this
was obtained by setting the tail at a slightly smaller angle than the
main planes.

The question of reducing the resistance by adopting 'stream-line' forms,
along which the air could flow uninterruptedly without the formation
of eddies, was not at first properly realised, though credit should be
given to Edouard Nieuport, who in 1909 produced a monoplane with a
very large body which almost completely enclosed the pilot and made the
machine very fast, for those days, with low horse-power. On one of these
machines C. T. Weyman won the Gordon-Bennett Cup for America in 1911
and another put up a fine performance in the same race with only a 30
horse-power engine. The subject, was however, early taken up by the
British Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which was established by
the Government in 1909, and designers began to rea