Wright Or Wrong?

In reading “Made In America,” Nicholas Delbanco’s article about Henry Ford Museum (Winter 1994), I was surprised to find what appeared to be a technical error on page 11. A device shown there was described as “a fan from the Wright brothers’ wind tunnel.” It seems obvious to me that you erred in assuming that the power output of the device was at the fan end. The machine appears to be a wind-driven grinding wheel. Note the abrasive stone and tool rests.

The editors reply: We asked John Bowditch, Curator of Industry at Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, to explain, and he wrote: “The prop is mounted on one end of a belt-operated grinding head. This grinder would originally have been driven from an overhead lineshaft, with two grinding wheels on the unit, one at each end. The Wrights simply removed one wheel, placed the prop in its place and drove this rather dangerous affair from the lineshaft they used to drive their machinery. One can only imagine the racket and vibration this unit must have made as it ran at about four times its intended speed with an unbalanced wooden propeller whirling at one end. I guess inventors had more nerve back then.”

Neel B. Ackerman
Savannah, Ga.