The Wright Brothers called their bold new concept wing warping. They set out to
test their theory by building a five foot biplane kite out of bamboo and
paper. It had cords that ran from the wings that crossed two sticks that
Wilbur held and, as he moved those sticks, the wings warped and he was able to bank
the kite. Up until that time, no one really had control over the kites. They
were just at the mercy of the wind, but here he was, he's able to make a descent
and climb on command. 700 miles from Dayton, a remote village of the Outer
Banks of North Carolina seemed ideal. Its sands promised soft landings, and its
solitude ensured the secrecy the guarded Wrights demanded. Kitty Hawk would become a
turn of the century version of area 51.
September 1900: the Wright Brothers' quest for flight
began in a place so remote that no one in the closest town could tell them how
to get there. Kitty Hawk was as obscure as the two bicycle makers who hoped to
make history there. The glider's control system featured two elements: a forward
mounted elevator enabled the pilot to nose up or down, and the innovative wing
warping system, which was linked to a foot operated t-bar. If you pushed back
with your right foot, then that would warp the wings to help you turn to the
right, and if you push with your left foot then that would help you turn to
the left. The Wrights begin by flying the glider as a tethered kite, with lines
running to the ground to operate the controls. The elevator worked pretty good,
the wings work relatively well, based upon all the engineering knowledge at
the time. [But] the thing just didn't generate as much lift as it should have,
so that year they were unable to really fly that glider as a true manned glider.
At one point they did enlist one of the local children - Tom Tate was his name -
to get on the glider and they flew it as a kite with him on board.
The Wrights returned to Kitty Hawk in 1901. They assembled a new, larger glider
and a hanger they erected themselves. Its wings were 22 feet long and 7 feet
wide, with a surface area almost double their original model. As they had done
the year before, the Wrights began by flying the glider as a kite. Unlike any
inventors before them, they chronicled every step of their progress, or lack of
it, with a wind tunnel. They crafted it from a wooden box that held laundry
starch. Power was supplied by a 1 cylinder gas engine used to run the
bicycle shop's machine tools. It drove a fan that created a 23 mile
per hour wind stream. You'll notice, as you look into the wind tunnel, this
would straighten the wind and give it a nice smooth flow all the way through.
Now, at the fore end of the wind tunnel, the Wrights put a balance. That balance is
how they measured lift. This balance was a very simple and crude affair. It was
made of old bicycle spokes and hacksaw blades. For each wind tunnel test, the
Wrights vertically mounted a miniature wing or airfoil on the balance.
Each airfoil had its own unique curvature in shape. Mounted near the
airfoil was a series of flat plates with known values of drag. By carefully
measuring the difference between the airfoils' effect on the airflow and that
of the flat plates, the brothers could calculate the airfoils' lift.
Over three months, they tested nearly 200 different air foils. The Wrights, like all
flight pioneers, knew that a wing produced lift by creating reduced air
pressure above and increased pressure below. Their challenge was to discover
which shape would create the greatest degree of lift. The problem was
they were generally pretty symmetrical. The high point was right in the center.
What they found was is that you really want to have the highest part about a
third of the way back, not halfway or not way up front like they did on their 1901
and 1902 gliders. Armed with their breakthrough findings, the Wrights
returned to Kitty Hawk in August 1902. They cannibalized their 1901 glider and
crafted a new mode, and not only modified the curvature of the airfoil
but made the wings ten feet longer and two feet narrower. They also added a
fixed vertical tail, reasoning that it would add to the glider's stability.
Finally, the brothers re-examined the glider's control system. During their
first free glides, the Wrights discovered that the new craft's wings generated
precisely the lift they had calculated. The new tail seemed to solve the problem
of the glider reversing course during a turn, but a vexing new problem arose.
At times, the glider slipped sideways, tipped on its low wing, and spun into the
sand. Every flight seemed fraught with risk. In September 1902, the
Wrights faced their closest brush with disaster. Orville was flying along, and the
glide has started to go out of control.
At the Wright Brothers camp, it was time for their unique approach to
problem-solving. They had a good time arguing about these problems. After a
while, they would generally come to an agreement but, by doing this, they would
really look at every angle, every side of an issue.
The unusual procedure yielded two inspired suggestions:
Orville proposed that they hinge the fixed vertical tail of their glider to make it
movable. Wilbur added a new wrinkle. He suggested they link it with pulleys to
the wing warping system. With one shift of the hips, the pilot could twist the
wings and turn the tail simultaneously. On October 10th, 1902, the Wrights were
ready to test their revamped glider. Four years of tenacious calculation and
painstaking work had boiled down to one critical moment.
Wilbur manned the controls. Orville and a Kitty Hawk local aimed the glider
directly into the stiff wind.
Wilbur throws his hips over to induce a roll to the right for a coordinated turn
and, for the first time in history, we have true flight.
The Wrights flew the revolutionary craft on 375 flights that October, the best
lasting 26 seconds. They were able to fly in any wind, they were able to stay in
the air for long periods of time, they were able to fly over 600 feet on some
of those glides. Still, they needed a light yet powerful engine, effective propellers
to produce adequate thrust, and a sturdy new frame to carry the weight and
withstand the vibration. The craft the Wrights would call the whopper flying
machine would be a fusion of innovative breakthroughs made with unparalleled
speed. Wilbur and Orville crafted their own engine with the help of their chief
bicycle mechanic Charlie Taylor. They cast the crankcase from aluminum, which
had only become commercially available in the past decade. The rest of the
engine was primitive, even by turn-of-the-century standards. It had no
fuel pump, carburetor, or spark plugs. Still, it produced 12 horsepower and
weighed only 179 pounds. As Taylor made the engine, the Wrights struggled with an
even greater challenge: the propellers. To that time, flight pioneers had assumed
that an aircraft propeller would function much like a ship's, pushing air
instead of water backward to drive a plane forward.
Months of study convinced Wilbur otherwise.
Wilbur's idea, that was very different, was that a propeller should be a wing on
its side, traveling in a spiral course in producing lift horizontally or producing
thrust. Applying the revolutionary theory, the Wrights carve to spruce propellers.
They could get by with a less powerful, lighter engine with the two propellants.
Compared to their gliders, the Wright Flyer was massive. The 1902 glider
weighed 120 pounds; the flyer weighed 605. The engine, comprising nearly a third of
that weight, was mounted to the right of the pilot. Since it outweigh each of the
brothers by 34 pounds, it made the aircraft unbalanced. To compensate, they
added four inches to the wing on the heavy side to create more lift. It took
several weeks to assemble the flyer and ready it for its critical first flight.
They feared they were too late. On December 8th, Langley invited the press
to witness the launch of his great aerodrome from a houseboat on the
Potomac River.
When the aerodrome was catapulted from its launch rail, its rear wings collapsed.
The plane plummeted in pieces. The pilot escaped unhurt, but the
disaster made Langley a laughingstock. If this scientist the man of
international renown, could not successfully develop a flying machine,
then the likelihood was no one could. Nine days after Langley's failure,
the Wright brothers prepared to fly in the face of conventional wisdom.
Since the flier had no wheels, they built a 60-foot launch rail out of
two-by-fours, laid end to end. The aircraft skids rested on a small dolly.
The Wrights recruited several members of Kitty Hawk's life-saving team to act as
their ground crew. They instructed one of them, John Daniels, to stand ready with
their camera. A toss of a coin determined that Orville
would take the controls. At 10:35 am, Orville boarded the flyer and the
engine who started. He releases that whole back wire, and that craft starts
down the rail. The flyer rose gracefully then followed a meandering up and down
course, as Orville struggled with the elevator. After a hundred and twenty feet,
it darted into the sand. John Daniels was so excited about seeing the aircraft
lift off the rail that he wasn't even certain if he had squeezed the shutter
bulb to take the photograph. Daniels needn't have worried. Initially, it
doesn't look like there's a lot there, but if you really look at that,
it's much more detailed than you think. You can see the launch rail, you can
see the little dolly that the plane was on, you can see the tools they used that
day: a shovel to level the ground, you can see a little grease bucket that they
used to grease the rail that the plane ran along, a dry cell battery to start
the engine. A professional photographer could not have done it any better than
John Daniels did that day. An hour after their first flight, Wilbur
piloted the second, covering a hundred and seventy-five feet. Orville flew the
third for 200 then, on flight number four that December
day, Wilbur kept the flier aloft 59 seconds,
soaring 852 feet. Minutes later a gust of wind overturned the flier and sent it
hurtling across the sand. The damage was beyond what they could quickly repair. It
would never fly again. The Wrights' unique talents had made
flight humankind's impossible dream a reality, but their mistrust of others
would nearly cost them the credit for it.