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The Wright Brothers Air Pioneers

Part 1: A Childhood of Curiosity

Orville and Wilbur Wright were born four years
 apart, in different cities. They shared a curiosity
 about the world and a love of tinkering1 that
 would make history.
Wilbur was born in 1867 on a small farm near
 Millville, Indiana. Orville was born in 1871 in a
 house in Dayton, Ohio. Their father was a Bishop
 in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ.
(The Wrights had five children in all: Reuchlin,
 Lorin, and Katharine were the names of the other
 children.)
Life in the Wright house was strict but loving. Both parents encouraged their children to enjoy school
 and learn as much as they could. A large library of books about all kinds of subjects helped the Wright
 children quench2 their thirst for knowledge from a very early age.
Orville and Wilbur’s fascination with flight began with a present their father gave them — a flying toy. It
 had a paper body and other parts made of cork and bamboo. Rubber bands provided the power. The
 young boys (7 and 11) were thrilled to make the little toy fly across the room, so much so that they
 broke it. They remembered how it looked, though, and promised each other that someday they would
 fly in the air, just like the little toy.
The boys continued to be interested in mechanical things and flight. Orville sold kites at school to make
 money. Wilbur started reading all he could about how birds flew and machines worked.

1. Tinker (verb): to try to repair or make adjustments to something
 2. to satisfy a thirst or desire for something

Though the boys were good students, neither graduated from high school. (Not many did in those
 days, actually.) Wilbur was hit in the face with a baseball bat when he was a teenager and suffered
 from irregular heartbeats the rest of his life. He stayed at home for a while, during which time their
 mother developed tuberculosis (which, at that time, was a devastating disease with no known cure).
Wilbur recovered himself and then stayed at home to care for his mother. Orville left high school on his
 own, to start a printing business. He and Wilbur designed a printing press that worked very well. The
 two later sold the printing business and opened a bicycle shop. They were both very good mechanics
 and could fix just about anything anyone asked them to fix. (They inherited this skill and desire from
 their mother, who was the family mechanic.)
It was in the bicycle shop that the idea of the airplane was born. One day, Wilbur squeezed an empty
 bicycle tube box flat. He noticed how it looked when he twisted in his hands. (The flattened box is the
 exact shape of the two-winged glider that the Wrights would produce just a couple years later.) They
 also used a bicycle chain as a propeller on their plane. (It should be pointed out here that the Wrights
 had to invent the propeller as a means of propulsion.) 3 The double-triangle design of the plane also
 looks a lot like a bicycle.
And one day in 1902, Orville and Wilbur took turns pedaling one of their own bicycles down a city
 street as fast as they could go — with a third wheel attached in front. The wheel was mounted flat on
 the handlebars. It spun freely, with two metal plates on top of it. One plate was flat, and the other was
 curved. This setup allowed the Wrights to measure air resistance,4 another key to building an airplane
 that would work.
The Wrights had also made kites, very large ones, in fact. By 1900, they were making ones so large that
 people could fly in them, sort of. These were called gliders, and Orville and Wilbur actually built one or
 two that were large enough for a person to ride in. They flew on nothing but air current, and the
 person could get a ride of about 10 seconds before the glider came down to the ground.

Part 2: Persistence to Success

The Wrights wanted more, of course, and built a better glider that had a rudder, to steer with. One of
 their gliders stayed aloft5 a time, flying more than 600 feet. But they still came down, no matter what
 the person aboard did. The Wrights wanted to make a machine such that the pilot could control when
 the machine would land.
They had thought of engines, of course, like the ones in factories. But these engines were much too
 big. Orville and Wilbur finally decided to make an engine that would be small enough and light enough
 to power one of their gliders. With their mother’s love of tinkering and their own curiosity driving them,
 they made an engine that would fit the bill and installed it on their newest glider.
The Wrights had chosen Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, as a place to test their plane. This spot had lots of
 wind, and it had a large sand dune that would hopefully catch the plane if something went wrong. They
 had been coming to Kitty Hawk for a few years, testing gliders and other ideas. They had built more
 complicated machines all the time.

3. Propulsion refers to the force or action of pushing something forward.
4. Air resistance is a type of friction that acts in opposition to a moving object, slowing down the direction of the object.
5. in the air

Part 3: Legacy in the Air
 So it was on December 14, 1903, that Wilbur Wright made the first experiment with the new manpowered
 airplane flight. The flight didn’t last long and ended in a crash, which took the Wrights a few
 days to repair. And it is worth noting that the plane got up its momentum6 on this attempt by gliding
 down a monorail from the top of a hill. (The plane had wheels, remember, and so it rolled down the
 rail, just like a bicycle.)
Wilbur was the pilot that day. The brothers had flipped a coin to see who would go first.
After repairing the plane, Orville and Wilbur decided to put the track on flat ground. This would allow
 Wilbur to run alongside the plane as it was gaining speed and keep the right wing steady. (Because the
 plane had been going downhill on the first attempt, Orville couldn’t keep up and so Wilbur had had to
 try to steer the plane himself. Not being familiar with how to do such a thing, Wilbur steered too much
 and the plane quickly hit the ground.)
With the coin flip results intact (meaning that it was Orville’s turn to fly), the little plane was launched
 on December 17. Wilbur pushed, Orville pedaled, and the plane rose in the air. It was only aloft for 12
 seconds and went 120 feet, but it was official: The Wright brothers had a machine that could fly.
Part 3: A Legacy in the Air
 They flew the machine three times that day, mainly because each time they managed to land without
 crashing. Each flight was a bit longer, and the final flight of the day carried Wilbur 852 feet. He was in
 the air for a full 59 seconds.
The Wright plane wasn’t a hit overnight, however. No one else knew about the flight. The brothers
 returned to their bicycle business in Dayton and also continued to refine their airplane invention. Not
 long after that, they had built a plane that could fly 25 miles and go 40 miles an hour. They even had a
 model that could fly circles in the air — and not go off-balance and crash to the ground!
In 1908, Wilbur flew one of their planes in front of royalty in Europe. In the same year, the rest of
 America discovered the airplane when a newspaper reporter witnessed a flight and wrote about it. The
 story was soon in newspapers all over the country. The Wrights were suddenly famous.
The very next year, they opened a business to make airplanes, the Wright Company. They found great
 fame and success making airplanes. Unfortunately, Wilbur died in 1912 of typhoid fever. Orville lived
 on, however, eventually selling his business and watching his and his brother’s dream become a reality
 in the modern industrial age.
[15]
 [20]
 6. Momentum is the strength or force an object gains through motion or a series of events.

DMU Timestamp: November 12, 2020 20:50





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