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Extracted from TheAirplaneRestaurant.com “Before the Wright brothers, no one in aviation did anything fundamentally right. Since the Wright Brothers, no one has done anything fundamentally different.” Wilbur Wright was born April 16, 1867, on a farm 8 miles from New Castle, Indiana, and Orville Wright was born August 19, 1871, in Dayton, Ohio. Mechanics fascinated the brothers even in childhood. To earn pocket money, they sold homemade mechanical toys. Orville launched a weekly newspaper called “the West Side News,” with Wilbur as editor. Wilbur was 25, Orville 21, when they began selling bicycles. Then they began to manufacture bicycles, assembling them in a room above their shop. After reading about the death of pioneer glider, Otto Lili, the brothers became interested in flying. Almost a century before Orville and Wilbur Wright took their place in history, the first fixed-wing aircraft, a kite mounted on a stick, had been conceived and flown. What the Wright brothers had accomplished was to design and build an aircraft that could be controlled while in the air. Every successful aircraft built since, beginning with the 1902 Wright Glider, had controls that roll the wings right or left, pitch the nose up or down, and yaw the nose from side to side. It is interesting that a sophisticated aircraft, recently tested, uses “warping” the wings to maneuver the plane. This is the same technique that the Wrights used in their epic flight. |
