Archimedes Plutonium wrote:
This is good what PBS is doing in teaching us about the Wright
brothers history. One almost wonders whether being bicycle mechanics
was the prefered mechanical route to becoming the first builders of
airplanes. I would hazard the guess that in the cosmos where and if
intelligent life exists say 100 such exoplanets that all 100 built
their first airplanes from the individuals who built bicycles or had
bicycle training.

snip

I wanted to talk about spruce wood and how important it was in the
Wright aircraft.

Question: were the planes in WW1 made of wood? Was it spruce wood? Was
the German ace of Red Baron a wooden plane?

I love the superiority list of woods. Some say that hickory has the
highest tensile strength and some say ash, as per baseball bats. I
seem to think that ash beats hickory but am not set up to prove it.

Didja hear the the superior sound qualities of the
violins of Stradivarius et. al. has been attributed to the
mini-Ice Age?

The trees of the era had much narrower growth rings than
those of modern trees, making their wood stiffer. That's why
it's impossible to make a forgery using wood from trees of
this warm period that sounds "right".

Now all you have to do is extrapolate what kinds of
wood-analogues can grow in planetary chemistries subtly or
wildly different from ours, AND take into acount climatic
variations on said planets.

Good luck.

Mark L. Fergerson