Orville and Wilbur Wright: Pioneers of the Age of Flight
Late in the autumn of 1878 our father came into the house one evening with some object partly concealed in his hands and before we could see what it was he tossed it into the air Instead of falling to the floor as we expected it flew across the room till it struck the ceiling where it fluttered awhile and finally sank to the floor It was a little toy known to scientists as a hélicoptère A toy so delicate lasted only a short time in the hands of small boys but its memory was abiding Orville Wright Century Magazine 1908 came home with a newfangled toy It was a small flying gizmo a sort of helicopter made of paper bamboo and cork It had a rubber band connected to a propeller The propeller was mounted atop of a stick When the boys twirled the propeller with their fingers the elastic wrapped tightly around the stick When they let go the elastic unwound quickly spinning the propeller The toy flew The little gadget was based on a design by Alphonse Pénaud a French aviation pioneer Alphonse had invented a rubber torsion motor in the early 1870s Toymakers in Europe had been making miniature models of the device ever since but the wonderful whirligig had only just made its way across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States Wilbur and Orville were fascinated with their new plaything They called it a bat 66
The BaT Man French inventor Alphonse Pénaud the son of a navy admiral was born in Paris in 1850 He intended to follow in his father’s footsteps but he had a hip condition that prevented him from joining the navy Instead the young man turned his interest in transportation to aircraft In 1870 Alphonse invented a rubber torsion motor a motor operated by a twisted rubber band Using this design he built a model aircraft he called a planophore It was 20 inches 51 centimeters long with an 18-inch 46-cm wingspan With its tail rudder and rear-mounted propeller the planophore was the first model aircraft capable of stable steady or secure flight It could fly almost 200 feet 60 meters Later Alphonse built a small ornithopter a flying machine that flapped its wings He also created model helicopters Toy versions of the helicopter and ornithopter were big sellers It was one of the small helicopters that sparked the Wright brothers interest in flying Throughout the 1870s Alphonse experimented with different styles of wings propellers and landing gear He eventually built full-sized flying machines He even tested floating aircraft Many of Alphonse’s ideas were sound but so far ahead of their time that he was ridiculed for them Because of that and because nobody would help fund his projects Alphonse gave up He committed suicide in 1880 at age 30 Today he is considered one of the most important aviation pioneers of his time Three of Alphonse Pénaud’s flying models From top to bottom the helicopter the planophore airplane and the ornithopter 7
The brothers played with the bat so much that they eventually broke it but instead of crying over a wrecked toy they built a new one When that one wore out they built another one We built a number of copies of the toy which flew successfully said Orville many years later Without even thinking about it the young Wright brothers had built their first flying machine They didn’t stop there though The inventive boys had so much fun building small bats that it gave them an idea for a bigger and better project They set out to create a bat so big that the two of them could fly in it Orville and Wilbur tried a number of designs using different combinations of materials shapes and concepts but none of their supersized bats would fly We found that the larger the bat the less it flew said Orville Not surprisingly the youngsters didn’t yet know enough about the physics of flight to create a human-sized flying machine We finally became discouraged said Orville We abandoned the experiments Still he said that little bat was what launched the Wright brothers future fascination with flight Taking Off Unlike many parents of the day Milton Wright and his wife Susan encouraged their kids to explore everything that grabbed their attention to read as much as they could and to let their imaginations soar They wanted the kids to get outside get dirty build things and broaden their horizons Portraits of Milton and Susan Koerner Wright the parents of Orville and Wilbur Wright 88
Flying inTo hisTory The first person to design a workable flying machine was Leonardo da Vinci In the 1480s he came up with concepts for a number of aircraft including the ornithopter with its flapping wings and his aerial screw an early helicopter While da Vinci’s machines never got off the ground the Montgolfier brothers hot-air balloon did It took off for the first time in France in 1793 In 1804 a British inventor flew a glider an aircraft without an engine for the first time A German engineer improved on that design in 1891 creating a more practical glider That same year an American astronomer designed an airplane that used steam power but it was too heavy to get off the ground After studying these previous designs Orville and Wilbur Wright invented the first gasoline-powered airplane The Flyer as they called it took off on December 17 1903 Leonardo da Vinci It’s hard to say who invented the helicopter Many people designed many different versions of it in the late 19th and early 20th centuries The one that most closely resembles helicopters of today was invented in the United States in 1939 by a Russian-born engineer named Igor Sikorsky A trading card shows the first public demonstration of the hot-air balloon designed and invented by the Montgolfier brothers on June 4 1783 in France A detail from a diagram of one of Leonardo’s flying machines showing the flapping wings of an ornithopter 9
