If you ask any elementary school student why the town of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina is significant to American history, they will immediately know the answer. They will know that it was where Orville and Wilber Wright built the first working airplane and discovered that man could fly.
Today, with thousands of airplanes taking to the skies every moment and flying high above the ground as common as riding a bicycle, a world where humans didn't fly seems as far away as the ancient Romans. But we must go back in time to the days before the Wright brothers made their phenomenal discovery and the invention of the first airplane, when there was a time when it was firmly believed that man would never fly like a bird, and indeed man was meant. never to fly, but always to be an earthly being. We can be thankful that the Wright brothers did not hold to this belief.
The date of the first successful flight was December 17, 1903. It was on that fateful day that Orville and Wilber successfully flew the first manned, powered, heavier-than-airplane. This breakthrough ranks among the greatest inventions in American history, and in truth, one of the great inventions of all time, when man dreamed of being able to fly as far as we have primitive drawings illustrating that dream.
The Wright brothers were well suited to go through tedious research to finally create a machine that could accomplish this feat. We all know that great inventions are often the result of hundreds or thousands of failures and tests, through which the inventor perfects his ideas and makes new discoveries that lead him step by step to that final breakthrough. This was certainly true of the Wright brothers.
Our reference to flying becoming as common as riding a bicycle is well chosen, for it was the Wright brothers' occupations as mechanics repairing printing presses, engines, and bicycles that gave them the knowledge of the inner workings of such machinery that was needed to create a machine that could sustain flight. Their work on perfecting the design of the common bicycle led them to believe that conquering flight was not a matter of providing enough power to the aircraft, as it provided the control and balance mechanisms to keep the aircraft properly stationary with enough consistency that it could last. in the air.
Long before this first successful flight, the Wright brothers had done their research. Using their bike shop as a makeshift laboratory, they first experimented with gliders and drones to refine their theories and designs. But finally on December 17, 1903, they achieved their dream of manned flight, if only for a short time. Orville Wright's account of this first flight is scientific and understated.
“Wilbur started the fourth and final flight at about 12 o'clock. The first few hundred feet were up and down as before, but when three hundred feet were covered the machine was under much better control. The course for the next four or five hundred feet had little undulation. When he was about eight hundred feet, however, the machine began to pitch again, and struck the ground with one of its downward arrows. The distance above the ground was measured as 852 feet; flight time was 59 seconds."
The Wright brothers had no idea that an entire new industry would be built on these simple experiments. Moreover, they achieved a dream that man had dreamed of for centuries, that they would actually be able to fly above the earth and return safely. It is truly one of the greatest achievements in American history.
You must be logged in to post a comment.