Wright Brothers for Kids: How They Invented the Airplane, 21 Activities Exploring the Science and History of Flight
1929 Katharine Wright Haskell dies 1932 Wright Brothers National Monument dedi cated Earhart is first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic 1939 World War II begins First jet airplane flight 1947 Yeager is first to fly faster than the speed of sound 1948 Orville Wright dies
PRE FA CE Dreams and Nightmares of a Flying Machine Ihe summer was not going well for Wilbur and Orville Wright The two bicycle makers broth ers from Ohio had arrived on the North Car olina coast in July after a long train ride ferry crossing and boat trip Kitty Hawk North Carolina was not an easy place to get to in 1901 But they'd spent the previous summer there testing a glider in the strong wind with some success And they'd wanted to come back to do the same with the newly designed glider they'd spent the winter building in Ohio The new 22 foot wide 6 7 m glider had much better wing controls for the pilot than the previous
model It would be the biggest glider ever flown Surely it would fly better and farther than last year’s glider Unfortunately bad weather arrived with the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk Heavy rain drenched the beach and the Wright brothers camp for an entire week The winds constantly whipped around wet stinging sand When the rain finally let up a plague of mosquitoes moved in The sand and grass and trees and hills and everything was fairly covered with them Orville wrote to his sister Katharine back home in Dayton They chewed us clear through our underwear and socks Lumps began swelling up all over my body like hen's eggs Orville and Wilbur were soon ill from the weather and insect bites When the brothers were finally able to put their new glider together and get started trying it out things only got worse The new glider just wouldn't fly as it was supposed to The wings didn't seem to lift the glider high up into the air as they should based on the brothers careful design And the new system of wing controls wasn't working either When Wilbur tried to steer the glider it would sometimes spin out of control In fact the glider was turning out to be dangerous One day as Wilbur flew over the sand the glider's left wing dipped When Wilbur used the controls to try to level out the glider it crashed into the sand The glider's front was badly smashed and so was Wilbur He had a black
bruised nose and cuts on his face The brothers didn't make many more glides after fixing the glider They went back to flying it attached to ropes like a kite When rains returned in August Orville and Wilbur gave up and started packing What was the point of staying They hadn't built a bigger better glider they’d just discovered a whole world of new problems They left their Kitty Hawk camp in late August and went home When they got back to Day ton Wilbur went straight to bed sick with a cold and depressed We doubted that we would ever resume our experiments wrote Wilbur later Building a suc cessful flying machine felt like a mountain they could never hope to climb They'd already worked so hard for so long and spent so much money Wilbur declared to Orville Not within a thousand years will man ever
