The Wright brothers made a small
engine-powered flying machine and proved that it was possible for humans to
really fly.
Wilbur Wright was born in eighteen
sixty-seven near Melville, Indiana. His brother Orville was born
four years later in Dayton, Ohio. Throughout their lives, they were best
friends. As Wilbur once said: "From the time we were little
children, Orville and I lived together, played together, worked together and
thought together."
Wilbur and Orville's father was a
bishop, an official of the United Brethren Church. He traveled a lot on
church business. Their mother was unusual for a woman of the nineteenth
century. She had completed college. She was especially good at
mathematics and science. And she was good at using tools to fix things or
make things.
One winter day when the Wright
brothers were young, all their friends were outside sliding down a hill
on wooden sleds. The Wright brothers were sad, because they did not have
a sled. So, Mrs. Wright said she would make one for them. She drew
a picture of a sled. It did not look like other sleds. It was lower
to the ground and not as wide. She told the boys it would be faster,
because there would be less resistance from the wind when they rode on
it. Mrs. Wright was correct. When the sled was finished, it was the
fastest one around. Wilbur and Orville felt like they were flying.
The sled project taught the Wright
brothers two important rules. They learned they could increase speed by
reducing wind resistance. And they learned the importance of drawing a
design. Mrs. Wright said: "If you draw it correctly on paper, it
will be right when you build it."
VOICE ONE:
When Wilbur was eleven years old and
Orville seven, Bishop Wright brought home a gift for them. It was a
small flying machine that flew like helicopters of today. It was
made of paper, bamboo and cork.
The motor was a rubber band that had
to be turned many times until it was tight. When the person holding the
toy helicopter let go, it rose straight up. It stayed in the air for a
few seconds. Then it floated down to the floor.
Wilbur and Orville played and played
with their new toy. Finally, the paper tore and the rubber band
broke. They made another one. But it was too heavy to fly.
Their first flying machine failed.
Their attempts to make the toy gave
them a new idea. They would make kites to fly and sell to their
friends. They made many designs and tested them. Finally, they had
the right design. The kites flew as though they had wings.
The Wright brothers continued to
experiment with mechanical things. Orville started a printing
business when he was in high school. He used a small printing machine
to publish a newspaper. He sold copies of the newspaper to the other
children in school, but he did not earn much money from the project.
Wilbur offered some advice to his
younger brother. Make the printing press bigger and publish a
bigger newspaper, he said. So, together, they designed and built
one. The machine looked strange. Yet it worked perfectly.
Soon, Orville and Wilbur were publishing a weekly newspaper.
They also printed materials for
local businessmen. They were finally earning money. Wilbur was
twenty-five years old and Orville twenty-one when they began to sell and repair
bicycles. Then they began to make them. But the Wright brothers
never stopped thinking about flying machines.
VOICE TWO:
In eighteen ninety-nine, Wilbur decided
to learn about all the different kinds of flying machines that had been
designed and tested through the years. Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington. He asked for all the information it had on
flying.
The Wright brothers read everything
they could about people who sailed through the air under huge
balloons. They also read about people who tried to fly on gliders
-- planes with wings, but no motors.
Then the Wright brothers began to
design their own flying machine. They used the ideas they had developed
from their earlier experiments with the toy helicopter, kites, printing machine
and bicycles.
Soon, they needed a place to test
their ideas about flight. They wrote to the Weather Bureau in
Washington to find the place with the best wind conditions. The
best place seemed to be a thin piece of sandy land in North Carolina along the
coast of the Atlantic Ocean. It was called Kill Devil Hill, near the town
of Kitty Hawk. It had the right wind and open space. Best of all,
it was private.
In nineteen hundred, the Wright
brothers tested a glider that could carry a person. But neither the first
or second glider they built had the lifting power needed for real flight.
Wilbur and Orville decided that what they had read about air pressure on curved
surfaces was wrong. So they built a wind tunnel two meters long in their
bicycle store in Dayton, Ohio. They tested more than two hundred designs
of wings. These tests gave them the correct information about air pressure
on curved surfaces. Now it was possible for them to design a machine that
could fly.
The Wright brothers built a third
glider. They took it to Kitty Hawk in the summer of
nineteen-oh-two. They made almost one thousand flights with the
glider. Some covered more than one hundred eighty meters. This
glider proved that they had solved most of the problems of balance in
flight. By the autumn of nineteen-oh-three, Wilbur and Orville had
designed and built an airplane powered by a gasoline engine. The plane
had wings twelve meters across. It weighed about three hundred
forty kilograms, including the pilot.
The Wright brothers returned to
Kitty Hawk. On December seventeen, nineteen-oh-three, they made the
world's first flight in a machine that was heavier than air and powered
by an engine. Orville flew the plane thirty-seven meters. He was in
the air for twelve seconds. The two brothers made three more flights that
day. The longest was made by Wilbur. He flew two hundred sixty
meters in fifty-nine seconds. Four other men watched the Wright brothers'
first flights. One of the men took pictures. Few newspapers,
however, noted the event.
Wilbur and Orville returned home to
Ohio. They built more powerful engines and flew better airplanes.
But their success was almost unknown. Most people still did not believe
flying was possible. It was almost five years before the Wright brothers
became famous. In nineteen-oh-eight, Wilbur went to France. He gave
demonstration flights at heights of ninety meters. A French company
agreed to begin making the Wright brothers' flying machine.
Orville made successful flights in
the United States at the time Wilbur was in France. One lasted an
hour. Orville also made fifty-seven complete circles over a field at Fort
Myer, Virginia. The United States War Department agreed to buy a Wright
brothers' plane. Wilbur and Orville suddenly became world heroes.
Newspapers wrote long stories about them. Crowds followed them. But
they were not seeking fame. They returned to Dayton where they continued
to improve their airplanes. They taught many others how to fly.
Wilbur Wright died of typhoid fever
in nineteen twelve. Orville Wright continued designing and
inventing until he died many years later, in nineteen forty-eight.
Today, the Wright brothers' first
airplane is in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Visitors to
the museum look at the Wright brothers' small plane with its cloth wings,
wooden controls and tiny engine. Then they see space vehicles and a rock
collected from the moon. This is striking evidence of the changes in the
world since Wilbur and Orville Wright began the modern age of flight, one
hundred years ago.
