The Wright Brothers´Flight (1903)

Orville and his brother Wilbur Wright started out in life working in the bicycle repair business, and they both became interested in the problems of flying when they read of the experiments of Otto Lilienthal in Germany.

Lilienthal´s experiments came to an abrupt end when his glider crashed in 1896 and he was killed; he had lost control of the balance of the glider and the Wright brothers believed that his attempt to maintain equilibrium just by shifting his body weight about was inadequate.

They developed the theory that the air pressure exerted on different parts of the machine could be altered by making the wings adjustable, and that this would maintain equilibrium. This system, now known as aileron control, is used today on all modern aircraft. The Wright brothers took out a patent on it. They carried out workshop experiments, using a wind tunnel, to test the aileron principle.

Starting in 1902, the brothers developed a full-sized power-driven heavier-than-air machine. The machine weighed only 340 Kg and was powered by a four-cylinder, petrol-fuelled motorcycle engine of 12 horsepower;  the engine block was cast aluminium, which gave it a high strength-to-weight ratio. It as piloted by Orville Wright on its first successful  flight on 17 December 1903, near Kill Devil Hill at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina, on that momentous day the first aeroplane made four sustained free flights, the longest lasting 59 seconds at an altitude of about 4.5m and at a speed of about 50 Km.

Several newspapers men were at he scene, but for some reason it was not considered very newsworthy; only three newspapers reported it. It was rather like the Gettysburg Address, a momentous event that was nor recognized as such at the time.

The machine on which the Wright brothers made their epoch-making first flight was for 20 years a major exhibit at the Science Museum in South Kensington. On 17 December 1948, the 45th anniversary of the Kitty Hawk flight, the pioneer plane was finally taken back to North America and installed as an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C.

Others in France and Germany were working on flight at the same time. The German aviation pioneer Karl Jatho, claimed that he had made a flight on 5 August, more that four months before the Wright brothers flight. Jatho flew a petrol-fuelled biplane he had built in 1899 and went on to set up an aircraft factory at Hanover in 1913. This looks like another case of coincidental simultaneous invention.

The experiments at Kitty Hawk continued. In 1905, Orville and Wilbur Wright learned how to prevent the tail-spin that had made short turns a problem. After that their flights became longer and more ambitious and in September that year Wilbur piloted the plane in a circle over a distance of more than 38 Km.

The brothers worked on an improved aeroplane which in 1908 stayed in the air for 1 hour 15 minutes. Further tests in 1909 satisfied the US government that this was a practical an reliable aircraft and led to the machine´s  general acceptance.  In 1908 and 1909, the Wright brothers flew their plane at numerous demonstrations in Europe. Flights at Le Mans, Pau and Rome attracted huge crowds to see them... crowds that included the kings of England, Italy an Spain...

In  the 1920s, aviation developed very fast, with longer and longer flights achieved  larger planes built that could carry passengers. By 1924, the first flight round the world had been achieved.

Aviation shortened distances between places, made it easier for people to travel from country to country, from continent to continent. The development of bigger and bigger passenger planes eventually brought relatively cheap air travel within the reach of millions of people...