In the Wright home, children were encouraged to pursue intellectual interests and to investigate whatever aroused their curiosity. Wilbur and Orville displayed mechanical aptitude, the gift of original thinking, and a pioneering urge. Sharing a common interest in mechanical devices, the boys made kites and toy helicopters, built a lathe and a printing press that worked. Wilbur wrote of their close associations:
Mrs. Wright died in 1889. It was that year that the brothers assembled their printing press from old parts found in junk yards and barns and began to publish a successful neighborhood weekly newspaper. Although each brother attended high school the full time required for a diploma, neither of them formally graduated from high school or attended college. Their two older brothers married and established homes of their own, but Wilbur and Orville remained bachelors. After completing their schooling they continued to live with their father and schoolteacher sister in a modest framehouse in Dayton.
Inseparable companions in business and personal life, the brothers shared everything from a joint bank account to their laboratory work while unraveling the problems of flight. They were not longfaced and dour; both were sprightly and humor-loving. They loved small children and dogs, and they played musical instruments, sang, and enjoyed practical jokes.
The bicycle business provided the funds for the Wrights'' work in aviation, and afforded them sufficient leisure to pursue their interest in flying. Their father gave each of his children $1,000. This Wilbur and Orville invested in stock and never drew on for their aviation work--but it was there in case of necessity. They were never financed by anyone.
The repair and manufacture of bicycles sharpened the brothers mechanical skill. The enterprise also developed their business experience, helpful later when they took the lead in founding the aviation industry. In their construction of flying machines, Wilbur and Orville often used the same equipment and tools used in repairing bicycles. They conducted many of their scientific experiments in the backroom of their shop, and most of the parts used in the first successful airplane were built there.
In the pioneers' direct line of descent from the Greek legend of Daedalus and Icarius to the Wrights is Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci drew some interesting sketches in the late 15th century, though a machine built from his drawings could not possibly have flown. The interest in England of Sir George Cayley influenced other men to undertake the problem.
A Frenchman, Alphonse Penaud experimented with toy helicopters, using twisted rubber bands for motive power. It was a Penaud toy helicopter, given to Wilbur and Orville by their father, that first stirred their childhood interest in flying. However, in Europe, most experimenters had turned from heavier-than-air machines to lighter-than-air dirigible balloons by the time the brothers took up the problem of heavier-than-air flight. The American-born Sir Hiram Maxim, after spending $100,000, had abandoned his work; the machine built by Clement Ader, at the expense of the French Government, had been a failure. None of the early experimenters attained sufficient knowledge of the aerodynamic principles involved to be able to design a successful powered machine capable of free, controlled, and sustained flight.
Only a few of the general public could distinguish between a heavier-than-air powered flying machine and a lighter-than-air gas bag equipped with propellers. Few knew that the problem of powered flight was not to fill a balloon with gas or hot air and float in it, or to glide in a complicated kite against air currents. Many among those who realized the obstacles to heavier-than-air flight in a powered machine believed it was as impossible as perpetual motion.
Wilbur and Orville acknowledged Otto Lilienthal, a famous German pioneer in aviation, as their greatest inspiration. Recognized as the father of gliding, Lilienthal made hundreds of glides with various apparatuses employing birdlike wings. First to explain scientifically why curved surfaces in a flying machine are superior to flat surfaces, Lilienthal's work on wing surfaces and air pressure proved valuable to the Wrights. Interested in scientific affairs, the brothers read with fascination and excitement, reports in 1895 of gliding flights by Lilienthal. But the art of gliding was neither a game nor child's play for aviation's pioneers. Lilienthal crashed and died as a result of a glider accident in 1896. Reading of his death, the Wrights wondered if they could go on from where he had left off.
Eventually the Wrights were ready to begin "a systematic study of the subject in preparation for practical work," and hoped to make contributions "to help on the future worker who will attain final success." Searching for, but finding little material on attempts to fly in the Dayton Public Library, Wilbur wrote, in May 1899, to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington seeking information about publications to read on aeronautics. The list of books and articles suggested by the Smithsonian included works by Dr. Samuel P. Langley who later became its director and secretary. The brothers were encouraged by seeing that a man of Langley's scientific standing believed in the possibility of flight at a time when few people did. Langley had been making aeronautical studies and experiments and succeeded in building power-driven models that flew. Later he built and attempted to fly a full-size, man-carrying powered machine; but in this he failed.
When a model flies, it does not necessarily follow that a full-size machine of the same design will also fly. As boys Wilbur and Orville had built model Penaud helicopters that flew, but even the Wrights could not later have built a successful man-carrying machine by merely following Penaud's same general design. The difficulty is--as early experimenters with model machines unhappily discovered--that when the linear measurement of a model is doubled it needs about eight times the power to make it fly.
Among the sources suggested by the Smithsonian was Octave Chanute's Progress in Flying Machines. Chanute, a successful contruction engineer living in Chicago, had directed experiments with gliders of his own design. A longtime encouraging friend and adviser to the Wrights, Chanute made an exhaustive study of the history of aeronautics.
Wilbur wrote his father:
The problem of equilibrium was the second major problem that the brothers had to solve. They needed to devise measures to steer or control a flying machine both up and down and to each side.
When the Wrights started their investigations they believed that others had already solved the problems of how to design wings, propellers, and motors. Only later did they realize that they must also correctly design both the wings and the propellers and build their own motor. Thus their third major problem became how to design wings sufficiently strong to support the weight of the machine, motor, and pilot to take the greatest advantage of air particles providing lift by streaming along the upper and lower surfaces of the wings.
A fourth major problem that faced Wilbur and Orville was how to design a light-weight, high-powered engine and the propellers required to drive the machine through the air. They were to find that these problems were interrelated and that they would solve them only after 4 1/2 years of spare-time study and experimentation.
Most pre-Wright experimenters had relied on human control to balance flying machines. The operator simply shifted the weight of his body to tilt the wings in the direction opposite from adverse action of the wind. But the continual contortions and acrobatics required to maintain equilibrium by this method were not within the skill of many experimenters. While using it, both Lilienthal and Percy S. Pilcher, an English experimenter, were killed in nose dives.
Chanute sought to effect "automatic stability" independent of the operator by causing the flying machine's structurally automatic supporting surfaces to adjust positions by flexible joints automatically with changes in the wind. Wilbur and Orville were to conceive a different method of control than that sought by Chanute, though they themselves later designed and patented an "automatic" device-- a pendulum analogous to Sperry's gyroscope.
At Dayton, in 1899, the Wrights were ready to move beyond the first phase of study, speculation, and discussion. Their combined attack on the problem of equilibrium resulted in the conception of one of the fundamental principles of aeronautics. Their reasoned principle for lateral control of a flying machine was that the movement of an airfoil about its longitudinal axis could be controlled by means of a pressure differential exerted on its opposing lateral extremities (the principle known today as aileron control). Both modern-day ailerons and the Wrights' wing-warping are merely arbitrary mechanical devices for applying this principle. The brothers' first achievement was the conception of the principle itself.
Wilbur and Orville decided first to test their principle of control in a small model glider to see if it worked, thus sparing themselves from being injured if it did not. At first it occurred to them to effect the result of their principle by pivoting the right and left wings on geared shafts at the stable center of a glider. One wing would turn upward in front when the other turned down, and the balance would readjust. But there seemed to be no way to make this device strong enough without making the glider too heavy. They finally decided on warping or twisting the wings as the simplest and most effective method to effect the result of their principle. (It still would be effective if used today.) The wingtips were to be warped by means of cables controlled by the operator. By warping the wingtips, they expected to vary the inclination of sections of the wings at the tips, and obtain force for restoring balance from the difference in the lifts of the two wingtips.
While twisting a small pasteboard box with opposite ends removed, Wilbur (61k) observed that though the vertical sides were rigid endwise, the top and bottom sides could be twisted to have different angles at the opposite ends. Here was a simple means of warping the wings as they intended. They decided that a biplane's wings could be twisted or warped in like manner, enabling them while flying in a glider to warp the wings on the right and left sides to present their surfaces to the air at different angles. By warping the wingtips the operator would be able to increase the angle of attack on one wingtip and decrease it on the other. Thus, they believed, the operator could obtain a greater lift on whichever side he needed it and less lift on the other side in order to assure lateral equilibrium. (They later had to modify this by adding a movable vertical tail. )
To test their principle safely, the brothers built a model glider-- actually a kite--with a 5-foot wingspan. Flown as a kite at Dayton, the model glider's wing surfaces were warped by the use of four cords reaching from the upper and lower wingtips on each side to the operator on the ground. Balance from front to rear was maintained in part by an elevator tested variously at the front and rear, as well as by other means. The Wrights believed after the tests that the model glider had demonstrated the efficiency of their system of obtaining both lateral and longitudinal control.
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