Learn

Long before the airplane was ever invented, people had dreams of flying. Many people must have watched the birds soaring in the wind and wondered how they too could accomplish such an amazing feat. And a certain few of those people actually took the initiative to try and make it happen. If it weren’t for these talented, motivated and resourceful humans, you probably wouldn’t be able to travel from Massachusetts to California in 5 hours through the air. Thanks to the brilliant efforts of these people, we can now all fly like the birds, let’s see how it all started.

The first person to conquer the air was Otto Lilenthal from Germany. In the 1880’s he was already writing a book of aerodynamic data which became the greatest influence for the design of an airplane. Otto himself not only wrote about flying, but he actually flew as well, though not with an engine powered craft. Instead, his early invention was a glider in which his body swung from below. His philosophy was to first get up in the air, fly around on his gliders, and obtain the feel of an airplane before putting an engine in.

Otto Lilenthal’s successor was a man named Samuel Pierpont Langley from the United States. In 1896 he produced a steam-driven model of an airplane that flew for three-quarters of a mile and then flew another model that was driven by gasoline. However, his attempts at meeting the challenge of a man carrying craft failed.

Then came the ever-so-famous Wilbur and Orville Wright. Wilbur first became interested in the idea of flight when her read of Otto Lilienthal’s gliding experiments. Both men were always trying to learn. They had an immense love for books, and an intense curiosity for how things worked. They learned about flight by watching buzzards fly, and by reading as much as they could about the mechanics of flight. In 1899, the Wright brothers built their first machine; a glider like Otto Lilienthals. They had the same philosophy Otto had, which was to master the art of gliding to gain an understanding of how a powered machine would work. Once that was done they added an engine to their craft. On December 17, 1903, they were geared and ready to fly the world’s first airplane, The Wright Flyer. People didn’t believe that the brothers would be able to accomplish their dream. But alas they were successful and became the first to achieve a powered, sustained, and controlled flight of an airplane.