Category Flying and Gliding

Ralph Johnstone

Ralph Johnstone, the performer who engaged in mock air battles with Arch Hoxsey, was a veteran performer, having toured America and Europe as a trick cyclist on the Vaudeville circuit. Although he was a far more cautious pilot than the brash Hoxsey, Johnstone also knew how to thrill audiences with his flying skill. Johnstone met a grislier end than most of his comrades who died while performing aviation stunts.

During a 1910 show in Denver, Johnstone was flying about 800 feet above the ground when his airplane broke up. As he struggled to gain control of the plane, he was tossed from his seat, which, like all airplane seats at the time, wasn’t equipped with a seat belt.

Johnstone’s luck held, however, at least for the moment. As he was falling overboard he stopped his fall when he reached out and grasped a strut. He hung on desperately as the plane sped toward the ground and crashed. The spectators were horror-struck, but recovered their senses in time to rifle the bloody body for souvenirs of gloves and pieces of clothing.

The Vin Fiz Falls Flat

Ralph Johnstone

By the Book

Barnstormer was the name given to the swaggering and sometimes unsavory pilots who swooped down past barnyards and farmhouses to signal to everyone for miles around that airplane rides were being sold.

With their breakneck antics, the early barnstormers managed to plant seeds in our collective psyche that made flying appear to be a life-and-death struggle with the elements. Though that may have been an accurate description in the early years of aviation, flying today is far from the dangerous pastime that it once was, and modern pilots are a bit less swashbuckling.

There may never have been a pilot more dashing than Cal Rodgers, but as most of those who shared the skies with him, he died young and he died in an airplane. Still, it was Rodgers who first proved to a skeptical American public that flying could progress beyond a death sport to become a viable way of getting from one side of the continent to the other.

Spurred by a $50,000 prize offered by publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst to the first flyer who could complete a coast-to-coast flight, Rodgers and a handful of other pilots signed up in 1911 to hopscotch across a country where airplanes were almost as unfamiliar as flying saucers and where airfields were all but nonexistent. The Hearst prize imposed a 30-day time limit, a daunting challenge in 1911.

Part of Rodgers’ appeal during his grueling cross-country race was the name of his Wright EX (for “Experimental’) biplane: the Vin Fiz. In exchange for emergency money—and he’d need all of that—Rodgers agreed to advertise Armour’s new grape soda on his plane by painting Vin Fiz across the bottom of his wings. As it turned out, the Vin Fiz people might have got a better value for their marketing dollars if Rodgers had emblazoned the slogan on the sides of his plane; he spent far more time grounded than he did aloft.

All told, in his trip across the country, Rodgers survived 14 minor crashes, five total crackups, uncounted engine failures in flight, an in-flight scalding when an engine hose sprayed loose, and a head-on collision with a chicken coop. Finally, with the Pacific Ocean finish line in sight after 49 days of misery and near-fatal accidents, he crashed again on the final leg from Pasadena to the beach. This time he crushed the bones in his ankle; the injury required a month to heal.

At last, 84 days—nearly three months—after leaving New York, Rodgers rolled the wheels of the Vin Fiz into the surf of the Pacific Ocean, carrying only a rudder and an oil pan from the original plane. Everything else had been destroyed and replaced en route.

Ralph Johnstone

Cal Rodgers (right) completed a grueling cross country flight in 1911 in hopes of winning $50,000 He didn’t even come close to completing the flight in the allotted time, but he was the only flyer to actually finish the flight. He died in a plane accident shortly afterward.

Because he badly overshot Hearst’s 30-day deadline, Rodgers was left empty-handed in Los Angeles. But he had movie-star looks and enough personality to charm a curious nation. Even if technically Rodgers’s flight was a failure, it was successful in that it—and Rodgers—turned America’s eyes toward the possibility of commercial aviation.

Four months after finishing the Vin Fiz tour, and almost on the very spot where he made his final landing at the end of that adventure, Rodgers flew his Wright EX into a flock of gulls—apparently in a deliberate show of bravado. One of the gulls jammed his rudder and caused the plane to fall out of control. Rodgers died of a broken back and a broken neck.

His tombstone reads, with characteristic flair:“I endure—I conquer.”

The Wrights” Deadly Circus

Many pilots in aviation’s rollicking early years earned fame by flying on an air circus circuit organized by the Wrights. The famous inventors took to the road in 1910 with a stable of young pilots who were eager to perform and earn the top-dollar salary that the Wrights paid them. Wilbur and Orville paid their air circus pilots $20 per week in base pay, and another $50 for every day they actually flew. That could amount to $7,000 per season for some pilots, and that was enough incentive to convince performers to fly some hair-raising stunts.

One of the pilots who Hew with the Wright Exhibition Company was Arch Hoxsey. Hoxsey was a daredevil who tried to outperform his fellow pilots by pushing his speed a little higher than theirs or by zooming lower to the ground than they did. He was a bit too reckless for the Wrights, who once grounded him in hopes of cooling

his love for danger. But the brothers trusted Hoxsey’s skill enough to assign him to pilot a flight with ex-President Teddy Roosevelt as his passenger.

The Wrights” Deadly Circus

Hoxsey’s specialty was performing in a kind of aerial battle with fellow pilot Ralph Johnstone. The two created the myth in the local papers that they disliked each other and were actually trying to hurt each other in the air. In reality, the pair were friends, but their act never failed to thrill spectators.

Hoxsey didn’t reserve his hazardous flying to his air circus performances, however. He liked to attempt to fly to higher and higher altitudes, and during one of those attempts at a California show, he either lost control of his airplane or something broke. Whatever the cause, Hoxsey’s plane spun thousands of feet from the sky and crashed, killing him.

Harriet Quimby

Harriet Quimby was one of the early thrill pilots—and one of the first to“buy the farm.” The Manhattan secretary and former drama critic with beauty-queen looks was the first woman to earn an American pilot’s certificate, and she hoped to win world fame with it. She figured that she could quickly make a name for herself if she was the first woman to fly across the English Channel. In April 1912, she did just that, departing from Dover and landing safely on the Normandy coast. But unfortunately for her, the historic flight was pushed out of the headlines for a slightly bigger story: The “unsinkable’Tifarac had gone to the bottom of the icy North Atlantic the previous night.

Harriet Quimby

Plane Talk

Early pilots were not only cheating death, they were defying science. At the time, scientists thought that flying over 60 miles per hour would be deadly because the wind would be so strong it would suck the air right out of a pilot’s lungs.

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Harriet Quimby

Undeterred, Quimby sailed back to the United States with plans to make real headlines. She entered the Boston-Harvard air meet, where she intended to set a speed record. Just before her attempt, she took her Bleriot two-seater up for a warm-up flight, carrying a passenger along for the ride. When she had flown out over Boston Harbor, spectators on the ground saw the plane make a sudden dip and saw the passenger fall from the plane and plunge hundreds of feet into the water. Harriet managed to recover control, but a few moments later, the plane again dipped, this time tossing Harriet to her death.

Plane Talk

Boston and other areas in the Northeast were a center of flying enthusiasm in the early days of aviation, probably because the Hub was home to some of the brightest engineering minds in the country. Over the years, however, better weather elsewhere, particularly in the South and Southwest, spread flying fever throughout the nation.

————– ——- ————— mm————————– . I…—————————————————————————————————————————————— ———- ——————————— ————- ■ – ■ ■—— 1————

Lincoln Beachey

Lincoln Beachey was another daring young pilot who didn’t survive to be a daring old one. Beachey was the first, and perhaps greatest, pilot of the “flying circuses,” as people called the barnstorming shows that traveled across the country. Beachey helped define the daring art form by creating some of its best-loved stunts. He was the first to loop an airplane by flying in a vertical circle. He was the first to fly upside down. He even flew “under” Niagara Falls by plunging down over the brink of the

American River and into the mist before reappearing near the water’s surface below. And Beachey created his signature “dip of death”—a stunt that was eventually to be the death of him.

In 1915, while performing an air circus act in his hometown of San Francisco, something went wrong during the “dip of death,” in which Beachey rocketed toward the ground at terrifying speed, then pulled up at the last moment. The stunt was a heartstopper, and it was known to make spectators faint in fear.

During his last stunt, though, his speed, which usually approached a then-blistering 90 m. p.h., got out of control at 103 m. p.h. Before he neared the ground where he could level off, the wings of his airplane crumpled, and he crashed.

Harriet Quimby

Plane Talk

Stunt flying continue! to take its toll today, sometimes even in Hollywood. One of the most famous movie mishaps took the life of legendary stunt flyer Art “The Professor’

Scholl, a disciplined flyer with an engineer1 s mind who flew hit stunt routines with his little dog Aileron as copilot. While flying a dangerous inverted flat spin during the filming of the movie Top Cun, something went wrong that no one yet understands. The stunt, though dangerous, was one that Scholl knew well and had performed safely hundreds of times before. On his final flight though, Scholl didn’t recover from the spin, and radioed his ground crew, Tvc got a problem.’ A few seconds later, he radioed again for the last time: Tve really got a problem.’

The Flight That Wasn’t?

In the end, the fabric of Whitehead’s case is left in tatters. If nothing else, Whitehead failed as a publicist, something at which the Wrights excelled. After all, Wilbur and Orville’s very first telegram announcing their successful first flight included just one command: “Inform press!”

The Flight That Wasn't?

Years after his purported history-making flight, Whitehead supporters pieced together a machine they believed duplicated the inventor’s, even though Whitehead left precious few instructions or printed plans. Later, one of these models, equipped with modern engines, actually flew.

Whitehead supporters haven’t let the issue rest. For years, they have pestered officials at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington to probe into the Whitehead case until evidence turns up to back their claim. Museum curators flatly refuse to open the case, and Whitehead’s case, to say nothing of his original airplane, has no chance of getting off the ground.

The Flight That Wasn't?

Plane Talk

The who-was-first battle і» considered far from over by Whitehead supporters. One of the most prominent forces arrayed behind Whitehead is a retired naturopathic physician and Connecticut state senator who pushed through a law forcing the Smithsonian Institution to hold hearings on the Whitehead claims. So far, the Smithsonian has refused, fueling charges among Whitehead zealots of a pro-Wright conspiracy and coverup in the halls of the national museum.

 

The Least You Need to Know

► The Wright brothers applied their mechanical brilliance to their passion— gliding.

V The Wrights combined painstaking research with engine know-how to make the first successful airplane.

>• Gustave Whitehead and his supporters contest the Wrights’ claim as the first to fly, but the best evidence remains in the Wrights’ favor.

 

Chapter 3

Barnstormers and Other Risk Takers

The Flight That Wasn't?

in This Chapter

V’ Early pilots who tempted fate ► The most daring men: barnstormers V Air mail takes its first dangerous steps

————– ‘^шшннаїншнпяїнннір

As with any technological revolution, aviation in its adolescence had its share of daredevils who probed its boundaries. Those death-defying pilots of the early Air Age not only discovered some unforgiving barriers— namely the ground or a building—but they also succeeded in bringing the new pursuit of flying to a curious public.

Plane Talk

The newspaper accounts of Whitehead’s pre-Wright flight were full of wonder and praise, but they are also puzzling. For decades, Whitehead proponents have pointed to the news account and to later stories in Scientific American, as proof of their claims. But the fact that the news stories weren’t written until five days after the reputed flight casts the whole matter in a less certain light After all, manned heavier-than-air flight was at the time the most debated and controversial topic of discussion among scientists and engi­neers. What reporter, who had witnessed the flight could have resisted writing the story immediately and beaming the news via telegraph to every newspaper in the country? Why wait five days?

Whitehead’s first flight, he claimed, had taken place two years earlier, in 1899. If the claim is true, the flight must have been spectacular, not only for the wild crash that brought it to an end but also because it was so far ahead of its time.

The best testimony we have about the flight comes from Louis Darvaritch, who said he was the lone passenger on that flight in his role as stoker for the steam engine that powered the craft. Darvaritch recounted the details of the 1899 flight in an affidavit he gave in 1934. But he was also a friend of Whitehead’s, a fact that pro – Wright forces marshal in refuting the claim.

According to his sworn account, Darvaritch went along on the half – mile flight, which at times reached altitudes of 20 to 25 feet. But a mansion loomed and Whitehead wasn’t able to maneuver around it. The plane struck the building three stories above the ground. Whitehead wasn’t hurt in the crackup, but Darvaritch was badly scalded by the hot water in the steam engine and was taken to a hospital for a few weeks. (The hospital records have since been lost.)

The arguments against this account are legion. For starters, it’s hard to imagine an accident as spectacular as this one, complete with a burst boiler, horrific burn injuries, and a smashed-up flying machine on the ground beneath a plainly visible impact mark on a mansion wall. Can you imagine anything that would attract more attention, not only from local civic officials but also by sensation-hungry reporters? And it is a rare homeowner who would not go to court to make an example out of a local eccentric who had smashed into his wall, presumably costing a good deal more to repair than the itinerant mechanic laborer could afford to pay. Documents should show records of a hefty lawsuit, but none has been discovered. A complaint describing the damage to a wall 25 feet off the ground by a flying contraption would all but seal the first-flyer debate in Whitehead’s favor.

Plane Talk

On Course

Do you think Whitehead’s claims deserve more investigation? Call the National Air and Space Museum at 202-357-2700 to press your case. So far, museum administrators have refused to consider the case, and consider the Wright brothers the world’s tint flyers.

Finally, there are few engines that need more pounds of machine for each horsepower than a steam engine. Perhaps a mule driving a mill wheel is slightly less efficient, but not by much. The weight of an engine powerful enough to carry the plane, two passengers, a stash of fUel for stoking, not to mention the engine’s own weight, would be far too heavy to have succeeded. In 1986, when Whitehead backers successfully flew a rough approximation of one of his later models, they did nothing to prove the feasibility of Whitehead’s motors. They only set out to test the design, which they learned was just barely up to the task.

Whitehead may or may not have been first in the air, but he certainly deserves credit for his creativity. It’s been said that to a man with a hammer,

every problem looks like a nail. Well, for Whitehead, a gifted mechanic and engine designer, the problem of flying could be solved by throwing in as many engines as possible. To him, that meant using one engine to accelerate his bat-winged craft on the ground, then two more to keep it aloft. The wing-mounted engines each turned their own propeller, and Whitehead planned to use a difference in the power of each engine as his rudder: A faster-racing engine on the left wing, say, would propel its side faster than its counterpart on the right wing, turning the plane to the right.

Proof Positive

The Wrights were prepared to prove their claim to be the first people to fly. They set up a camera and asked one of the members of the local rescue squad, or “Life Saving men,” as Orville called them, to snap the shutter once the Flyer flew off the ground. The man who snapped the picture was J. D. Daniel, and here’s what Orville wrote about that moment: “One of the Life Saving men snapped the camera for us, taking a picture just as the machine had reached the end of the track and had risen to a height of about two feet. The slow forward speed of the machine over the ground is clearly shown in the picture by Wilbur’s attitude. He stayed along beside the machine without any effort.”

Подпись: Plane Talk The Wright brothers may have been the first to fly, but don't think they received any special treatment when the government began issuing pilot certificates in 1910. Cerb'ficate no. 1 went to daredevil and speed racer Glenn Curtiss; no. 2 went to balloonist and military officer Frank Lahm; no. 3 was assigned to balloonist and self-taught endurance flyer Louis Paulhan; and finally, nos. 4 and 5 were given to Orville and Wilbur Wright, respectively. Why push the Wrights to the back of the line for the first certificates? Given the small number of trained pilots at the time, bureaucrats opted for simplicity; They handed out the certificates in alphabetical order.

Daniels had still more excitement ahead of him that day. Around noon, after the brothers had already made three more flights, the longest covering 850 feet in 59 seconds, a gust of wind began to overturn the Flyer while it was resting on the ground. Orville and Daniels raced to one rising wing and tried to hold it down. Orville lost his grip, but Daniels held on as the Flyer turned over and tumbled across the ground several times. Daniels was all right, but the Flyer was banged up so badly the brothers didn’t make any more flights that year.

Who Was Really First?

Almost from the time they first flew, it has been fashionable for iconoclasts to poohpooh the Wright brothers’ achievement in designing, testing, and flying the first airplane. Conspiracists, mostly in the camp of a German-born flying enthusiast named Gustave Whitehead, rail and protest against the bicycle makers, insisting that any
number of other people deserve the title of “first aviator.” Undoubtedly, a lot of the spite directed against the Wrights stemmed from the brothers’ 1906 patent of the Flyer, a move that many of their competitors saw as disrespectful of other pioneers whose research contributed to the Wrights’ success.

The most credible and dogged effort to dislodge the Wrights comes from Connecticut and the descendents of Gustave Whitehead. But why don’t you be the judge? Gustave Whitehead

Could a flyer have beaten the Wrights into the air by as much as four years? Hard to believe, but that was the claim of a German sailor turned concrete salesman named Gustave Whitehead. After shipwrecking in the Gulf of Mexico as a young man, Whitehead made two key decisions: to give up his job at sea and to settle in America. After wandering through Pennsylvania and the Northeast, Whitehead landed in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he worked as a mechanic and tinkered with flying machines. Whitehead had a talent for building engines, including the 10- horsepower acetylene motor that helped him make history’s first flight—if his story is to be believed.

Proof Positive

Plane Talk

Gustave Whitehead was so crazy about flying and parachuting even at a boy that he early on earned the nickname "The Flyer." The nickname it ironic, considering that the airplane that he thought helped the Wright brothers steal his place in history was also named the Flyer.

In 1901, Whitehead claimed, he flew for the second time (that’s right, second time), a half-mile jaunt that came off uneventfully, or so The New York Herald reported shortly after the August 14 flight. On the same day. The Boston Transcript reported the very same flight, citing details that were nearly identical to those reported in The Herald. News reports published five days after the Bridgeport flight summed up the event: “Last week Whitehead flew in his machine half a mile.” According to the newspaper, the flight was flawless.

Proof Positive

German-born Connecticut mechanic Gustave
Whitehead claimed to have beaten the Wright
brothers into the air by several years, and
he still has plenty of believers.

Proof Positive

Ready for Takeoff

By the end of 1903, after years of testing wings and models in wind tunnels and ofjumping off sand dunes strapped to their gliders, the brothers were ready to try to fly. They had combined an airframe, an engine, and two propellers that they hoped would do what they wanted: maintain level flight in a machine they could steer and control. Even if they had no idea how to land the thing, the Wrights would at least start learning to control it in the air.

Ready for Takeoff

Plane Talk

Three seb of control surfaces combine to allow pilots to smoothly maneuver in the air. Ailerons, the hinged vanes near the bp of both wings, move in opposite erections from each other and are responsible for turning the airplane left or right The elevators, the hinged vanes on the rear edge of the horizontal stabilizer, allow the pilot to move the nose up or down. The rudder, which is attached to the vertical stabilizer, helps pilots con­trol the direction the nose points in and, in coordinab’on with the ailerons, has a subtle role in turning the plane. We’ll learn all about these different control surfaces in Chapter 7, "How Airplanes Fly, Part I: The Parts of a Plane."

The first attempt to get the Flyer off the ground came in mid – December 1903, and ended in a crack – up. Wilbur won a coin-toss for the chance to make the first flight in the Flyer which the brothers had equipped with a 12-horsepower motor that turned two handmade propellers. Wilbur climbed in and layed flat on the bottom of the plane’s two wings, and Orville pushed the plane along the monorail track built on the sand. The plane lifted off the ground, but it stayed in the air for just a couple of seconds before it crashed into the sand. Wilbur wasn’t injured too badly, but the airplane needed two days’ worth of repairs. When it was finally put back together, it was Orville’s turn at the controls.

On the next flight attempt, Orville pushed the Wrights’ home-built engine to full throttle, and with Wilbur at the wingtip to steady the plane, rolled off down the monorail track. Almost exactly where the brothers calculated it would, the 700-pound Flyer lifted off the rail and flew unsteadily into a 20 m. p.h. wind. Orville controlled the plane’s bank by warping the wingtips using cables connected to a sort of steering wheel. And he kept it straight and level using a combination of rudder and elevator.

Ready for Takeoff

Twelve seconds later and 120 feet down the beach, Orville let the Flyer settle back to the sand, bringing an end to the first controlled, heavier-than-air flight and sparking a technological revolution that would change the world.

The Wrights sent their family in Dayton a telegram announcing their success. It was sent without punctuation and with some eccentric capitalization: “Success

Подпись: four flights thursday morning All against twenty one mile wind started from Level with engine power alone speed through air thirty one miles longest 57 second inform Press home Christmas.”
Ready for Takeoff

With local resident J. D. Daniels manning the camera, Orville Wright
becomes the first human to make a sustained, controlled flight,
while his brother Wilbur helps steady the wings.

Ready for Takeoff

The Wrights were no fools. They established concrete proof of their history-making
flight by dashing off a telegram, which set them firmly in the history books,
but didn’t exactly impress everyone back home in Dayton, Ohio.

Lilienthal, Chanute and Langley

For all their independent thinking, the Wrights relied heavily on the groundbreaking experiments of three creative geniuses who formed a small group of competitors vying with each other to make the first controlled, powered flight. In addition to studying the work of Lilienthal, the brothers stayed in touch with Paris-born engineer Octave Chanute and intellectual gadfly Samuel Pierpont Langley.

Chanute was working in the United States on the same thorny problems of aerodynamics, stability, and aircraft control that Lilienthal faced in Germany. He was too old to do any of his own flying, being in his 60s when he came into aviation, so Chant hired pilots to do the actual air work. Chanute had an engineer’s mind and a keen sense of the forces at work in flight. The Wrights relied heavily on his research, and it was actually Chanute who convinced the bicycle building brothers to design their flyer using the sturdy strut-and-wire design; Wilbur and Orville had been inclined to rely on the more delicate bat-wing design favored by Lilienthal.

So in a way, Octave Chanute, who has been largely pushed aside by history, is responsible for the evolution of aircraft design. The truss construction he advocated continues to play a role in airplane design to this day, and is still used in modern biplanes made for stunt pilots.

Lilienthal, Chanute and Langley

The third member of the inspirational trio that lit the way for the Wrights’ first controlled flight was a mostly self-taught engineer and architect from Roxbury, Massachusetts, named Samuel Pierpont Langly. When he wasn’t conducting groundbreaking astronomy research or heading up the Smithsonian Institution, Langly made important discoveries in aerodynamics and aircraft design.

In fact, Langly came within days of beating the Wrights to the Holy Grail of the first powered, controlled flight. In November 1903, a month before the Wrights’ success in North Carolina, Langly’s singlewing aircraft, or “monoplane,” was twice launched from a houseboat floating in the Potomac River near Washington, D. C. In both attempts, the airplane, which Langly called the Aerodrome, fell into the river and cracked up; the pilot, a young Cornell University student named Charles Matthew Manly, nearly drowned both times.

Manly, incidentally, may have been a flop as a pilot, but he had a certain magical gift for designing engines, the technological hurdle that, more than anything, delayed the Wrights’ first flight. In fact, Manly designed an engine for Langly’s Aerodrome that produced between 40 and 50 horsepower, making it a remarkably powerful motor for the time.

Turbulence

Подпись: Do you Ihink the Wright brother* і named their plane the flyer ' became they were certain it would fly? Think again. The plane, which now resides in the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, was named for one of the models of bicycle the Wrights manufactured in their Dayton shop.

For the Wrights, it was the engine questions, more than the design of their airplane, that kept them awake at night. They needed to reach a workable compromise that yielded light weight but also enough horsepower to propel the craft on its rails. The airplane, dubbed the Flyer, had no wheels, which was not surprising considering that none of their test gliders featured wheels. It took off from a wooden monorail track and landed on wooden skids. The weight of wheels, tires, and all the suspension gear that goes along with them was simply too heavy for those early flights.

“Turning” Point.

Although researchers like Chanute, Langley, and Lilienthal deserve a portion of the credit for inspiring the structure and design of the Flyer, one of the plane’s most important innovations was something the Wrights figured out without anyone else’s help. Before their successful flight in 1903, the Wrights suffered the same problems the other pioneers did when trying to control the plane’s direction in flight. No one had figured out a good way to turn the airplane. But while fiddling around with a long cardboard box, the brothers experienced an epiphany that was to provide the margin by which they won the race for the first flight.

The brothers noticed that if they twisted the long box, one end would turn upward while the other would turn downward. They quickly devised a method to twist, or warp, the wings of their flying machines, which diverted the air passing over the wings and enabled a pilot to bank the wings. Now, the Wrights would be able to make controlled turns during flight, something that baffled the other experimenters. Together, the warpable wings, movable rudder, and front – mounted elevator to point the nose up or down allowed the Flyer to maneuver.

Getting Off the Ground

The Wright brothers’ first flight at Kill Devil Hill in December 1903 was as much an exercise in audacity as it was a test of flying know-how. The brothers, who ran their own bicycle shop and who had taught themselves how to build everything from printing presses to airplane propellers, braved something that more timid souls at the time thought was suicidal folly: They strapped themselves to a craft that was little more than an oversized kite and lit the fires of a temperamental motor that spun a pair of homemade wooden propellers. If nothing else, Wilbur and Orville Wright were brave!

But the Wrights were also brilliant. They were voracious gatherers of new information and fresh news about the technology of flight. They stayed in touch with the most advanced experimenters and incorporated the best results of competitors’ work into their own, then added a dash of their own genius to the mix.

And they were unparalleled tinkerers. Together, there was almost no machine they needed that they couldn’t fashion out of spare parts and rubbish they found lying around their shop. Once, in 1892, the brothers used a broken tombstone and some spare buggy parts to cobble together a printing press that they used to start a printing business and to print their own newspaper.

Getting Off the Ground

Before they put a motor and two propellers on their airplane, the Wrights spent years refining their piloting instincts by flying gliders off any hillside they could find.

In 1896, while Wilbur was housebound recovering from an injury, the brothers read about the tragic death of glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal. (Read more about Lilienthal in Chapter 1, “The Earliest Aviators.”) Right away, they began devouring every book they could find about Lilienthal, his gliders, and the newly born science of aeronautics. It wasn’t long before the brothers concluded that much of Lilienthal’s findings were wrong and they began conducting flight tests using gliders of their own design.

Getting Off the Ground

Life wasn’t very sweet on the cold, windswept dunes of Kill Devil Hill, North Carolina. The Wright brothers and the few locals who helped them work on their airplane often had to duck into a shack for shelter from the piercing wind that seemed to blow continuously.

Подпись: By the Book The Wn'ght brother*' wind tunnel wat a long wooden box that used a motorized propeller to accelerate air into one tide and out the other. Researchers intert a wing or other aircraft surface into the high-tpeed air itream to ttudy ib aerodynamic reactions.
Подпись: On Course Why Kitty Hawk? Why didn't the Wright brother! conduct their aeronautical experiment! closer to their hometown of Dayton, Ohio? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind—literally. The brothers rcicarched the country's windiest sites, and learned that the low-lying and nearly deserted beaches around Kitty Hawk enjoyed the steadiest winds anywhere. The windi of Kill Devil Hill, near Kitty Hawk, were critical to the first successful flight

While they were testing Lilienthal’s research, the Wright brothers happened upon a 30-year-old technology called the “wind tunnel,” which helped them put theoretical aerodynamics to the test. Their wind tunnel was the first ever built in the modern style, using a large mouth to draw air in, then accelerating it through a narrow throat. Even without their later successes in controlled powered flight, their wind-tunnel innovation alone would have placed the Wrights firmly among the pantheon of aviation pathfinders.

The Bishop’s Boys: Wilbur and Orville Wright

The Bishop’s Boys: Wilbur and Orville Wright

The Bishop’s Boys: Wilbur and Orville Wright

At the turn of the twentieth century, flying was about to take a giant step forward. As we saw in the last chapter, the science of flight began to take off in the last few years of the 1700s, when daring experimenters pushed the boundaries of ballooning by flying to higher and higher altitudes. In the late 1800s, some even attached early internal combustion motors to the balloons to create a sort of early blimp.

In the late 1800s, groups of pioneers began to do their own experimenting by strapping homemade wings to their backs and soaring off cliffs. These first bird-men, building better and better gliders, paved the way for a new breed of flyer that was about to emerge. The early glider pilots worked mostly in Europe, but something was brewing in Dayton, Ohio, that would give a couple of restless Midwest boys their own chapter in history.

The Bishop’s Boys

In 1878, Reverend Milton Wright brought home a little rubber band-powered toy for his sons Wilbur and Orville. Wilbur, who was 11 at the time, and Orville, who was 7, took turns winding it up and sending it flying off around the room. The toy, which resembled a helicopter, was delicate and it wasn’t long before it was damaged beyond repair. But those few hours the boys spent flying a toy around their house was enough to set them off on a career that led to man’s first heavier-than – air flight.

Later, the brothers dropped out of high school and started a couple of businesses that made them enough money to support their hobby of building gliders, as other experimenters were doing. Eventually, they started fiddling around with an engine, propellers, and the complicated systems that would enable them not to glide, but fly.

The Race to Fly

The Bishop’s Boys: Wilbur and Orville Wright

Turbulence

Toy makers were delighting chil­dren with helicopter-like flying toys long before the Wright brothers came along—but don’t be fooled into thinking that the helicopter was invented before the airplane. The first American helicopter didn’t fly until 1939.

The brothers read everything they could lay their hands on about other would-be flyers and the glider experiments going on in Europe and America. They were latecomers in a race that seemed to be already out of their reach. But the bicycle makers from Dayton had a personal chemistry that enabled them to catch up with and then surpass their competitors.

Still, when Wilbur and Orville finally made history’s first sustained, controlled flight in December 1903, the event was almost anticlimactic. Just look at the setting where the pivotal technological feat of the first half of the century took place: a deserted, windblown beach on the North Carolina coast, where the brothers worked in near isolation.

This kind of roughing-it aviation had a whole different flavor from what was going on then in Europe. On the Continent, would-be flyers gathered in clubs and salons to hear lectures while they sipped wine and cordials. And while some members of the European intelligentsia debated whether controlled, heavier-than-air flight was even possible, the Wrights tinkered with their hand-built engine and sanded their selfdesigned propellers in that drafty shack on Kill Devil Hill.

The somewhat primitive conditions the Wrights chose to do their research and conduct their early flights in are deceptive: What Wilbur and Orville did on that sandblown beach was years ahead of its time. In fact, although the Wrights would continue to refine and improve their planes as soon as they finished their first powered flight, it wasn’t until 1906 that anyone else was able to make even as small a flight as the brothers’ initial 12- second hop. And it took even longer for another American to match the feat. Glenn Curtiss managed to fly his June Bug in 1908; by which time the Wrights had already flown hundreds of times in trips of dozens of miles at a time. While major technological breakthroughs typically inspire wild flurries of imitations and discoveries, the Wrights’ flight was so advanced that the brothers had no competitors for years.

The Bishop’s Boys: Wilbur and Orville Wright

The Wright brothers, Orville (left) and Wilbur, were inseparable for most of their lives.‘ They were in a number of businesses together, including the airplane and engine company that made them rich.