If you ask any student even in elementary school why the
town of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina is significant to American history, they
will know the answer immediately. They
will know that this was the place that Orville and Wilber Wright made the first
working airplane and discovered that man could fly.
Today, with thousands of airplanes taking to the sky at any
given moment and the experience of flying high above the earth as common as
riding a bicycle, it seems that a world where men did not fly is as far away as
the ancient Romans. But we have to
travel in time back to the days before the Wright brothers made their
phenomenal discovery and the invention of the first aircraft when there was a
time when it was firmly believed that man would never fly like a bird and
indeed, man was meant to never fly but always be a terrestrial being. We can be grateful that the Wright brothers
did not hold to that belief.
The date of that first successful flight was December 17,
1903. It was on that fateful day that
Orville and Wilber successfully flew the first controlled, powered, heavier
than air airplane. This break through
ranks as one of the greatest inventions of American history and in truth, one
of the great inventions of all time as man had been dreaming of being able to
fly as far back as we have primitive drawings illustrating that dream.
The Wright brothers were well suited to go through the
tedious research to finally create a machine that could accomplish this
feat. We all know that great inventions
are often the results of hundreds or thousands of failures and tests by which
the inventor refines his ideas and makes new discoveries that take him step by
step toward that final break through.
That was certainly true of the Wright brothers.
Our reference to flight becoming as common as riding a bicycle
is well chosen because it was the Wright brothers vocation as mechanics
repairing printing presses, motors and bicycles that gave them the knowledge of
the inner workings of such machines that was needed to create a machine that
could sustain flight. Their work to
perfect the design of the common bicycle lead them to believe that conquering
flight was not a question of providing sufficient power to the aircraft as it
was providing mechanisms of control and balance to properly keep the aircraft
steady with sufficient consistency that it could take to the air.
Long before that first successful flight, the Wright
brothers conducted their research. Using
their bicycle shop as a makeshift laboratory, they first experimented with
gliders and unmanned aircraft to refine their theories and their designs. But finally on December 17, 1903, they
achieved their dream of manned flight, even if only for a short time. Orville Wright’s account of that first flight
is scientific and understated.
"Wilbur started the fourth and last flight at just about 12
o'clock. The first few hundred feet were
up and down, as before, but by the time three hundred feet had been covered,
the machine was under much better control.
The course for the next four or five hundred feet had but little
undulation. However, when out about
eight hundred feet the machine began pitching again, and, in one of its darts
downward, struck the ground. The
distance over the ground was measured to be 852 feet; the time of the flight
was 59 seconds.”
Little did the Wright brothers know that an entire new
industry would be built around these simple experiments. Moreover, they had achieved a dream man had
dreamed for centuries, to actually be able to fly above the ground and come
back safely. It is truly one of the
great accomplishments of American history.
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