How Wilbur Wright Taught Europe To Fly (February 1960 | Volume: 11, Issue: 2)

How Wilbur Wright Taught Europe To Fly

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Authors: Charles H. Gibbs-smith

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February 1960 | Volume 11, Issue 2

Most Americans know that Wilbur and Orville Wright were the first to fly a powered airplane; a few know that they were the first to build a practical powered airplane; but almost no one in the United States seems to know that these remarkable brothers not only inspired Europeans to revive their all-but-moribund ambition to fly, but, in 1908, revolutionized European aviation when the French had been floundering intellectually in the field of aviation for six long years. The British, I regret to say, had been sound asleep since the death in 1899 of Percy S. Pilcher, the only man who had improved on Lilien that’s gliding, and who might have rivaled the Wrights. This is a sad admission, coming as it docs fium a European historian, but it is unfortunately all too true.

It is this revolution of 1908, caused by Wilbur’s flights near Le Mans in France, that is the subject of the pictures shown here. They come from a unique historical document recently unearthed in Paris for A MERICAN HERITAGE by Naomi Barry: an album of photographs dedicated by Wilbur himself to a little girl named Elizabeth and now owned by Af. Shot. Elizabeth was the daughter of French inventor and industrialist Léon Bollée, who had offered the American the hospitality of his home, and his factory at Le Mans in which to erect the epoch-making Flyer.

But the story really goes back to 1896, when the tragic death of Otto Lilienthal in Germany—killed when his glider crashed—deeply alfected a young bicycle maker named Wilbur Wright in Dayton, Ohio. It was not until 1899 that Wilbur finally took up the active pursuit of flying, and then enlisted the devoted collaboration of his younger brother, Orville. They made their first glider in 1900, their second in 1901, their third in 1902; and they Hew them in the bleak isolation of the Kill Devil sandhills, south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, because of the strong constant winds to be found there. By the autumn of 1902, they had drastically modified their third glider, and had finally achieved properly controlled glider flight. It was the element of control—despite their later brilliance in engine and propeller design—that was to lead the Wrights to their conquest of the air: sensitive, co-ordinated control of elevator to climb and dive, and’ of wing warping and rudder to bank and turn; sensitive co-ordinated control by the pilot of a Hying machine, to fly it where he willed it to fly, and—of equal importance—to hold it successfully in dynamic equilibrium against the vicissitudes of the air. No one but the Wrights had metthese problems, tackled them, and conquered them; no one in fact came anywhere near them in their achievements until the year 1909, and then only as a result of the Wrights’ example.

 

As all the world now knows, but did not realize until 1908, the Wrights’ first