The great flight of the Wright brothers

By : ujikiu / On : 24/11/2022

The feat of brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright in making the first flight of a motorized airplane, on December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, would revolutionize the history of the 20th century. The anecdotal thing is that the recognition of such an exceptional invention would take three years. Several coincidences would converge to postpone the worldwide joy.

For starters, there were only a handful of witnesses at the remote Atlantic-facing sandbar that served as the scene of the historic event, which earned only a brief account on the inside pages of a Dayton, Ohio, newspaper. < /b>the hometown of aviation pioneers. A piece of news that went unnoticed in the United States and Europe, where there were already organizations that encouraged experimentation with heavier-than-air aircraft.

Another adverse factor was the failure that same year of three consecutive tests promoted by Samuel Langley, principal of the prestigious Smithsonian Institution, on a floating platform on the Potomac River, near Washington. Each attempt was preceded by a publicity gimmick that only deepened skepticism and disappointment. In American public opinion the idea had taken hold that man would never achieve it.

The Wright brothers, who came from a middle-class family in the Midwest, shared a dream of flying from a very young age, after their father, an itinerant Episcopalian bishop, gave them a mechanical helicopter that defied the laws of flight. gravity. They had been raised in the Protestant ethic of hard work, in a home where intellectual curiosity and creativity were encouraged.

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Wilbur was four years older than Orville, and though they didn't look alike, people assumed they were twins because they had so many things in common. His voice, like his writing, was easily confused, both being music lovers: while the first practiced the harmonica, the second was fond of the mandolin, tending to hum the same songs absently. Being always together, their acquaintances called them "the boys" (the boys).

They were highly inventive and had extraordinary mechanical abilities. When bicycles became fashionable as a means of transportation at the end of the 19th century, they set up a workshop to manufacture them, with an attached store where they sold them. It was there that they began to design and assemble their prototype to carry out the first flight tests, within the framework of what they called "the mission" (the mission), in a code name.

The Wright brothers' great flight

They were inspired by the work of the German Otto Lilienthal, a mechanical and aeronautical engineer, who pioneered human flight in gliders, in one of whose trials he died tragically in 1896. They managed to establish a relationship with the Franco-American Octave Chanute, who was then a world eminence in the matter, whose valuable advice would be very useful to you. It was he who led them to the Kitty Hawk Experiment Field, a distant site that nonetheless guaranteed average winds of 14 miles per hour.

In 1900, tests began with a biplane built with muslin cloth, fir wood, and steel cables, which had a rudder activated by a pilot lying on the back of the fuselage. For its propulsion, a rail catapult was available that allowed it to reach the critical takeoff speed. In designing wings with camber or camber to improve lift, the Wrights meticulously observed the flight of a wide variety of birds. As Wilbur used to say: “Birds don't fly calmly”.