UP IN THE AIR: THE STORY OF THE WRIGHT BROTHERS
By BRIAN FLOCA
Posted: 3:49 am
July 22, 2008
STORY SO FAR: Wilbur and Orville Wright are testing their glider in the remote town of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
CHAPTER TEN
Into the Air
October 1900
Wilbur and Orville planned to kite the glider from a small derrick. That way they could ride it for hours at a time and learn to control it. But the machine proved so difficult to manage, and so frightening to ride, that the brothers abandoned this method. Instead, for two weeks they moved the machine through the air in every way they knew how. They flew it from the ground as a kite. They loaded it with chains, and even with Bill Tate's son, Tom, to see how it would fly with weight on it.
Finally, they simply hurled the glider from the top of a dune. It floated down, following the slope of the sand. Then, suddenly, the glider's leading edge pointed up. The glider nosed skyward, hung for a moment in the air, and then fell to the dune with a crack. The brothers scrambled down after it.
"One of the ribs," said Orville.
"We can splint it," said Wilbur.
One more splint would hardly be noticed at this point. The past two weeks had brought the glider countless wrecks and repairs. But while the glider was collecting cracks, tears, and stains, Wilbur and Orville were collecting information. The brothers studied everything about the way the glider moved. They used a device called an anemometer to measure wind speed. They rigged up a fish scale to measure the glider's air resistance. They set up a camera to record their experiments.
"The measurements help us understand what the glider's doing, and why," Wilbur explained to Bill Tate.
"Or why not," said Orville. The glider flew surprisingly well, but there were some confusing problems. For one thing, Wilbur and Orville struggled to find the best arrangement for the machine's front rudder, called the elevator. They tried it "in front, behind, and every other way," Orville wrote Katharine. "When we got through, Will was so mixed up he couldn't even theorize."
Then there was the problem with lift. "When the wing moves through the air," Will told Tate, "its shape, the slight curve of it, speeds up the air going over it. That lowers the air pressure above the wing. The combination of high pressure below the wing and lower pressure above it pushes up on the wing. It creates lift. That's what makes it fly."
"All right," said Tate.
"Now," said Orville, "we've got a formula, and information on air pressure, from a man named Otto Lilienthal."
"Sounds foreign," said Tate.
"German," said Orville.
"Go on."
"We used that formula and those numbers to figure out how much lift our wings would create," said Wilbur.
"But," said Orville, "something's not right. We need a stronger wind to lift this than Lilienthal's numbers predict."
