Getting Airborne

"It is my belief that flight is possible and, while I am taking up the investigation for pleasure rather than profit, I think there is a slight possibility of achieving fame and fortune from it." -- Wilbur Wright to his father, September 3, 1900

When they decided they wanted to see if humans could fly, the Wright brothers watched birds for hours, studying the way they turned by lifting one wing tip up and turning the other down. In 1899, they built a model kite that had a "wing warping" system. It worked so well, they wanted a bigger model, and they intended to test it somewhere that was very windy. The U.S. Weather Bureau recommended Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

One of the Wrights's earliest experiments involved building a small wind tunnel at their bicycle factory. It consisted of a gas engine hooked to a small fan that blew air through a cardboard box. Using paper wings, they could observe how air currents affected wing structure. Eventually, after trying 200 pairs of paper wings, they built full-sized wings that would give their aircraft lift and balance. They also compiled the first useful tables for calculating lift and drag.

They learned to fly by doing experiments with gliders, and during those flights they learned that they needed a better method of steering than weight-control. When their glider crashed into the soft dunes at Kitty Hawk, they learned that they must increase the air pressure under the wings to hold the craft up. They thought an engine could do it because it would cause more wind to go under the wings. The Wrights realized they needed a lightweight internal combustion gas engine. Since they were not using hydrogen, the danger of fire was not as great. But when they contacted manufacturing companies, nobody wanted to sell the brothers an engine. They thought it would disgrace their products to be attached to so foolish a project. So the brothers were forced to build their own engine.

In their first experiment, the glider did not fly because the engine was too heavy. They redesigned both the engine and the glider and then, on December 17, 1903, at 10:35 AM it flew 120 feet (36 m). The engine was a four-cylinder, twelve-horsepower, internal combustion gas engine. They tried again several times that day, and in the final flight of fifty-nine seconds achieved a distance of 852 feet (259 m). Only three or four men witnessed these short flights -- and they were apparently not much impressed. (Alter, Judy p.195)

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