Kitty Hawk: Humanity Takes Off
by Sylvia
Sikeston
1. An Island of Sand Let’s pretend the year is 1899 and you are a young inventor. You have set yourself the problem of building and flying the world’s first airplane. One of many problems you encounter is where to make your test flights. You contact the national weather service and ask for a place with daily, constant high winds. You need such a place because your flimsy, under-powered little airplane will need a good wind to fly. The weather bureau sends you a list of such places, and you choose the closest one to your home in Dayton, Ohio. It’s a remote spot on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It was reasoning like that which caused the words, "Kitty Hawk," to enter world history as the place where on December 17, 1903, human beings first achieved sustained mechanical flight. The Outer Banks are a series of barrier islands extending some miles out into the Atlantic Ocean. In 1899, there is only one town there, called Kitty Hawk, though it’s hardly a town. In fact, it’s little more than a post office to serve the few dozen people who live on the islands. If you visit Kitty Hawk today, you will find not just one town but a series of towns extending the length of the Outer Banks. The entire area is now a popular East Coast vacation and fishing area, filled with beach houses, condos, strip centers, and McDonald’s as far as the eye can see. As people have moved in, they have changed the appearance of the islands markedly with trees, shrubs, and grass everywhere. When Wilbur Wright first saw them in 1900 they were so barren and desolate that he remarked in a letter, "This is what I always imagined the Sahara Desert would look like." In other words, sand, sand, and more sand, much of it blown by the constant wind into beautiful dunes, some as high as 80 to 100 feet. For experimenting with an untested, rather crude, possibly dangerous aircraft, Kitty Hawk was an ideal site for a number of reasons: the wind, the large dunes for launching the craft, the soft sand for landings both intentional and unintentional. Of course, there were disadvantages, chief among them being that the nearest city of any size, Norfolk, Virginia, was some 60 miles distant, which meant getting supplies was a two-day undertaking. The other really bothersome disadvantage was the mosquitoes, which at times were so bad that the only escape was to wrap yourself in a blanket with only your nose exposed for hours at a time.
2. Two Brothers Born to Fly Wilbur and Orville Wright, sons of a scholarly preacher, grew up in a house full of books. Though they both attended public school, neither graduated from high school and neither attended a university. Their mother having died when they were young, their father and Katharine, their older sister, saw to it that they both received a thorough and rigorous education. Intensive reading and study at home supplanted and went far beyond what the boys learned in school, including higher mathematics, the sciences, history, art, architecture, literature, and languages. Having reached manhood, they both floundered a bit, unsure of what they wanted to do with their lives. Mechanically inclined, they decided to take advantage of the business opportunities presented by the great bicycle boom of the 1890s, the period when the bicycle as we know it was developed. In 189? they opened a bicycle shop in Dayton. As a hint of things to come in their lives, this was no mere bicycle sales and repair shop. The Wright brothers were already such skilled technicians, designers, and engineers—all self-taught, remember—that they began manufacturing bikes of their own design. Success came quickly, because the Wright bicycles were as carefully, meticulously crafted as their later flying machines would be. With success came boredom, and the brothers began casting about for a new challenge. The 1890s was also a time of ferment in the development of aviation. "Airships" (what we today call dirigibles),. while not common, were nonetheless flying both in North America and Europe. The airships used large bags filled with hydrogen, propelled by the low-powered internal combustion engines of the day. Experimenters on both continents had for a couple of decades also been at work on the problems of true flight and had made some progress in wing-design and the development of simple gliders. These early gliders were little more than bird-shaped kites from which a person hung. They were launched by running down a hill into a strong wind. "Flights" of several hundred feet had been achieved by 1890. In the 1890s a number of experimenters in Europe and America were hard at work trying to attach engines to the gliders, with universally disastrous results. So daunting was the problem of sustained, mechanical flight that more than a few prominent scientists and engineers at the time loudly informed the world that a "flying machine" was an oxymoron, that, in other words, we would never be able to create a mechanical device that would fly. As boys, the Wright brothers had once received a Christmas present in the form of a stick with a propeller on one end. By twirling the stick, one could make the thing "fly" and rise some feet into the air. The toy had fascinated them both. Now, as they considered what to do with their lives, they thought of that toy. In 1899, with far more temerity than they realized, they began their quest to create an "aeroplane." How did these two bicycle mechanics start? First they collected as much of the scientific and engineering literature concerning the then-infant field of aviation as they could. They wrote to aviation pioneers in Washington, New York, Chicago, London, Paris, and Berlin, requesting books and articles. Thus they quickly brought themselves up-to-date and were then able to formulate a development plan. It quickly became apparent to the brothers that the problem of sustained mechanical flight was far more complex than they had thought. One had to conceive and build a rigid and strong but very light structure with lifting surfaces, in other words, wings. But these wings had to support not only their own weight, but the weight of an engine and propellers and a pilot. The wings also had to be able to somehow enable the craft to "take off", i.e., leave the surface of the earth, then fly, and then "land’, i.e., return to the surface of the earth. Furthermore, one had to, for the first time in the history of transportation, deal with motion in three dimensions. Wagons, trains, cars, and bicycles move only in two dimensions: forward-backward, left-right. But the airplane adds up-down. The Wright brothers methodically worked their way through the long series of engineering solutions required by these problems. But it was some time before they realized that the most daunting problem of all was that of control. And it was precisely in that area where they made an inspired leap beyond all the other early aviation experimenters. By developing a complex set of rudder- and "wing-warping" controls, the Wright brothers by 1900 had created a glider capable of flying hundreds of feet under pretty good control.
3. The First Flight
They visited Kitty Hawk each year in 1900, 1901, and 1902, gradually perfecting the glider. At the end of their tests in 1902 they knew their goal was in sight. They returned to Dayton, designed and fabricated an engine and propellers. They then built a larger version of their successful glider, big enough to support the engine and propellers and one of the brothers (they each weighed about the same, 150 pounds). They arrived in Kitty Hawk September 26, 1903, to test their flying machine. So confident were they that they had told their father and sister that they would not be back in Dayton until they had flown. They conducted a further series of gliding tests, with excellent results. Then, as they were preparing the new, powered craft, weather problems began. A long series of storms moved across the Outer Banks. By November the weather was both cold and rainy. They begin ground-testing the craft, running the engine, testing the controls, and encountered many mechanical problems, some requiring one or the other of the brothers to go all the way back to Dayton (??? miles) to fabricate new parts. When the machine was finally ready to go, they were alarmed to discover that it weighed 700 pounds, 70 pounds more than they had designed the engine and wings to lift. They had no choice but to proceed. It was too late to turn back. Other problems arose. One of the 8-foot propellers developed a crack, and Orville had to return to Dayton to make a new one. By December 11, he was back. The plane was re-assembled and everything was ready. Their first attempt to fly on December 14 was a disaster. They launched it with Wilbur flying (they had flipped a coin) from halfway up the side of one of the high dunes and it promptly nosed over into the sand. They repaired the machine the next day and decided to try the next flight from level ground. On December 17 they were ready. Because Wilbur had had the first try on December 14, it was Orville’s turn. He got into the "flyer." Wilbur directed one of the islanders who was helping them to man a camera set up nearby and to snap a picture as soon as the craft left the ground. He started and warmed up the engines while Orville waited nervously. At 10:35 Orville moved a lever release a line holding the craft down. The flyer inched forward, accelerated, and after traveling some 40 feet lifted from the earth. The islander at the camera pushed the shutter release and the moment when humanity first flew was thus immortalized on film. The photograph is certainly one of the great documents of human history. There is Wilbur standing off to one side in an attitude of what? Incredulity? Excitement? And there is Orville, prone in this powered box kite, but he is flying. He is flying. Not only did he fly. He landed successfully. Controlled take-off, flying, and landing: the airplane was a reality. And they had photographs and witnesses to prove it. The first flight lasted 12 seconds and reached 120 feet. They tried three more flights that day, the last of which was 852 feet in 59 seconds. That evening they went to the telegraph office in Kitty Hawk and sent a telegram to their family in Ohio:
The place in the sand where they did it is now known as the Wright Brothers National Memorial. On the high dune where they conducted their gliding experiments is a large stone monument. At the foot of the dune, where they first flew, a series of four boulders has been placed marking the places they landed that first day. Nearby is a museum with exhibits chronicling the development of the first airplane, including full-size replicas of the 1902 glider and the 1903 flyer. Kitty Hawk is not easy to get to, being far from the nearest interstate highway. But it is well worth the trip. An extraordinary place for one of the most extraordinary technical feats of this civilization. END
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