Dayton Wright's Race To Build a Time Machine

When the RB-1 was constructed to compete in the 1920 Gordon Bennett trophy race in France, it utilized features unheard of in that era.

Jason McDowell

Tuesday, April 04, 2023 at 10:46 AM ET

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Perhaps in an effort to demonstrate the strength of a then-unheard-of strutless cantilever wing, pilots and engineers involved with the development of the RB-1 stand on the wing for a photo op. [Credit: USAF archives]

Key Takeaways:

The Dayton Wright RB-1, built in 1920 for the Gordon Bennett trophy race, was a revolutionary aircraft that significantly predated its era with numerous advanced features.
It incorporated pioneering aerodynamic innovations such as a fully-enclosed cockpit, a cantilever monoplane wing, patented retractable landing gear, and the first known variable-camber wing with adjustable leading and trailing edges.
These designs aimed to drastically reduce drag and optimize performance, standing in stark contrast to the prevalent biplanes of the time.
Despite its groundbreaking technology, the RB-1 failed to complete the 1920 race due to mechanical issues, but its forward-thinking concepts profoundly influenced the trajectory of future aircraft design.

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In the film Back to the Future II, the antagonist Biff Tannen steals a sports almanac containing scores from every major sporting event over a 50-year time span and delivers it to his younger self via a time machine. Armed with this knowledge from the future, his younger self then utilizes the almanac to gamble, amassing a fortune estimated by fan websites to exceed $3.1 billion and forever altering the trajectory of that timeline.

While there’s no concrete evidence a similar chain of events occurred in the world of aeronautical engineering, the concepts utilized by the Dayton Wright RB-1 certainly suggest at least one time machine was involved in its development.