Museums 101: The Birth of Aviation (photo diary)

by Ojibwa for Kossack Air Force

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Friday, Apr. 07, 2023 Friday, Apr. 07, 2023 at 8:30:03am PDT

Modern aviation involved powered flight began in Dayton, Ohio with Wilber and Orville Wright. The interpretive center for the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park, a part of the National Park Service, has a series of displays explaining the early development of aviation.

The Wright Brothers

Wilber and Orville Wright were among the seven children of Milton and Susan Wright. Milton was an official for The Church of The United Brethren in Christ.

P1320331 — The display shown above shows the Wright brothers playing with a parachute. This small flying machine, purchased by Milton in 1878 for the children, fascinated Wilber and Orville. They studied it and built several versions.

The Wright brothers first experiments with flying began with gliders. In late nineteenth-century Europe, a number of people, including aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal, were designing and building gliders which could take people aloft. The Wright brothers obtained these early designs which they used in building their first gliders. Orville Wright would write:

“After reading the pamphlets sent to us by the Smithsonian, we became highly enthusiastic with the idea of gliding as a sport.”

After reading the material, the Wright brothers concluded that aviation required three things: (1) wings for lift; (2) a power plant; and (3) a way to control the aircraft in flight.

Control

In developing aircraft, whether gliders or powered airplanes, the issue of control was critical.

In the nineteenth-century gliders steering was done by simply flinging body weight in the direction the pilot wanted to go. This was awkward, imprecise, and, at times, dangerous. According to one display:

“Wilbur had observed that a soaring bird lifted one wing tip up and pressed the other down in order to bank in mid air.”

In 1899, Wilber stumbled on the solution to control by casually twisting a cardboard inner tube box. This led to the idea of “wing warping.”

According to one display:

“But, Wilbur and Orville made control a top priority. They designed a forward elevator to allow the pilot to control pitch (up and down). Later they added a hip cradle system that allowed the pilot to roll (or turn) the glider in either direction.”

P1320366 — The model shown above shows the hip cradle.

Lift

Lift requires wings. The Wright brothers used the lift tables developed by Otto Lilienthal to design their wings. Their 1900 glider, which included wing warping, was tested at Kitty Hawk and performed well. However, it had difficulty in lifting the weight of the pilot in normal winds. In 1901, they made a larger glider and again tested it at Kitty Hawk. However, they found that their 1901 glider was temperamental and difficult to control. To determine what went wrong, they built a wind tunnel in their bicycle shop and used it to test wing shapes. They soon found that Lilienthal’s tables were wrong.

According to one of the displays:

“The Wright brothers’ wind tunnel work pushed them to the leading edge of aeronautical research. By December 1901, the two bicycle men from Dayton knew more about wing design than anyone in the world.”

1902 Wright Glider (replica)

The Wright brothers re-designed their glider and took it to Kitty Hawk in 1902. According to one of the displays:

“It flew better than all of their other machines and the inventors became convinced that they were very close to solving the problem of flight.”

The 1902 glider had a wingspan of 32 feet, a length of 16 feet, 1 inch, and a height of 8 feet. This glider was the first aircraft to be under the complete command of the pilot. It made more than 250 glides and the Wright brothers patented the control principles incorporated into this glider.

Propeller

In the beginning, the Wright brothers assumed that known marine propeller theories could be adapted to aircraft propulsion. They were wrong: an aircraft propeller had to be different, it needed to function as a rotary wing to create the thrust necessary to move an aircraft forward. According to one display:

“This brilliant insight was a testimony to the Wright brothers’ genius. And it mean that the two men could apply all they had learned about wing design in the wind tunnel to the creation of their airplane propellers.”