History of Flight
The Wright Brothers
.
The Wright Brothers invented and flew the first powered and piloted airplane.
The Wright Brothers invented and flew the first powered and piloted airplane.
By Mary
Bellis
In 1899, after Wilbur Wright had written a letter of request to the
Smithsonian Institution for information about flight experiments, the Wright
Brothers designed their first aircraft.
It was a small, biplane
glider flown as a kite to test their solution for controlling the craft by wing
warping.
Wing warping is a method of
arching the wingtips slightly to control the aircraft's rolling motion and
balance.
LESSONS FROM BIRDWATCHING
LESSONS FROM BIRDWATCHING
The Wright Brothers spent
a great deal of time observing birds in flight.
They noticed that birds
soared into the wind and that the air flowing over the curved surface of their
wings created lift.
Birds change the shape of
their wings to turn and maneuver.
They believed that they could
use this technique to obtain roll control by warping, or changing the shape, of
a portion of the wing.
THE GLIDERS EXPERIMENTS
THE GLIDERS EXPERIMENTS
Over the next three years, Wilbur and his brother Orville would
design a series of gliders that would be flown in both unmanned (as kites) and
piloted flights.
They read about the works of
Cayley and Langley and the hang-gliding flights of Otto Lilienthal.
They corresponded with Octave
Chanute concerning some of their
ideas.
They recognized that control
of the flying aircraft would be the most crucial and hardest problem to solve.
So
following a successful glider test, the Wrights built and tested a full-size
glider.
They selected Kitty Hawk, North Carolina as their test site
because of its wind, sand, hilly terrain and remote location.
In the year 1900, the
Wright brothers successfully tested their new 50-pound biplane glider with its
17-foot wingspan and wing-warping mechanism at Kitty Hawk in both unmanned and
piloted flights.
In fact, it was the first piloted glider. Based upon the
results, the Wright Brothers planned to refine the controls and landing gear,
and build a bigger glider.
In
1901, at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, the Wright Brothers flew the largest
glider ever flown. It had a 22-foot wingspan, a weight of nearly 100
pounds and skids for landing.
However, many problems
occurred.
The wings did not have enough
lifting power, forward elevator was not effective in controlling the pitch and
the wing-warping mechanism occasionally caused the airplane to spin out of
control.
In
their disappointment, they predicted that man will probably not fly in their
lifetime.
In
spite of the problems with their last attempts at flight, the Wright
brothers reviewed their test results and determined that the calculations
they had used were not reliable.
They decided to build a wind
tunnel to test a variety of wing shapes and their effect on lift.
Based upon these tests, the
inventors had a greater understanding of how an airfoil (wing) works and could
calculate with greater accuracy how well a particular wing design would fly.
They planned to design a new
glider with a 32-foot wingspan and a tail to help stabilize it.
THE FLYER
THE FLYER
In 1902, the Wright brothers flew numerous test glides using
their new glider.
Their studies showed that a
movable tail would help balance the craft and so they connected a movable tail
to the wing-warping wires to coordinate turns.
With successful glides to
verify their wind tunnel tests, the inventors planned to build a powered
aircraft.
After
months of studying how propellers work, the Wright Brothers designed a motor
and a new aircraft sturdy enough to accommodate the motor's weight and
vibrations.
The craft weighed 700 pounds
and came to be known as the Flyer.
THE FIRST MANNED FLIGHT
THE FIRST MANNED FLIGHT
The Wright brothers built a movable track to help launch the
Flyer.
This downhill track would
help the aircraft gain enough air speed to fly.
After two attempts to fly
this machine, one of which resulted in a minor crash, Orville Wright took the
Flyer for a 12-second, sustained flight on December 17, 1903.
This was the first successfully powered and piloted flight in
history.
In
1904, the first flight lasting more than five minutes took place on November
9th. The Flyer II was flown by Wilbur Wright.
In
1908, passenger flight took a turn for the worse when the first fatal air crash
occurred on September 17.
Orville Wright was piloting
the plane. Orville Wright survived the crash, but his passenger, Signal Corps
Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, did not.
The Wright Brothers had been
allowing passengers to fly with them since May 14, 1908.
In
1909, the U.S. Government bought its first airplane, a Wright Brothers biplane,
on July 30.
The airplane sold for $25,000 plus a bonus of $5,000 because it
exceeded 40 mph.
WRIGHT BROTHERS - VIN FIZ
WRIGHT BROTHERS - VIN FIZ
In 1911, the Wrights' Vin Fiz was the first airplane to
cross the United States.
The
flight took 84 days, stopping 70 times.
.
.
It
crash-landed so many times that little of its original building materials were
still on the plane when it arrived in California.
.
.
The Vin
Fiz was named after a grape soda made by the Armour Packing Company.
FIRST
ARMED AIRPLANE
In 1912, a Wright Brothers plane, the first airplane
armed with a machine gun was flown at an airport in College Park, Maryland.
The
airport had existed since 1909 when the Wright Brothers took their
government-purchased airplane there to teach Army officers to fly.
On July 18, 1914, an Aviation
Section of the Signal Corps (part of the Army) was established.
Its flying unit contained
airplanes made by the Wright Brothers as well as some made by their chief
competitor, Glenn Curtiss.
PATENT SUIT
That same year, the U.S. Court has decided in favor of
the Wright Brothers in a patent suit against Glenn Curtiss.
.
.
The
issue concerned lateral control of aircraft, for which the Wrights maintained
they held patents.
Although Curtiss's invention,
ailerons (French for "little wing"), was far different from the
Wrights' wing-warping mechanism, the Court determined that use of lateral
controls by others was "unauthorized" by patent law.
https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-flight-the-wright-brothers-1992681
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