Lesson 7: Aviation and Military Technology
This lesson will discuss the airplane and technologies that were produced for the military.
Airplanes
Most people think that manned aircraft started when Orville and Wilbur Wright sailed into the air in December of 1903. This flight lasted 59 seconds. They reached a height of 852 feet, while flying over the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. While this was the first flight that could be considered successful, Orville and Wilbur were not the first to soar across the sky, just the first to do it in a self-propelled vehicle that could take off and land safely.
For a century before the famous flight in Kitty Hawk, both Europeans and Americans had been experimenting with balloons and gliders. Once the internal combustion engine was perfected in the 1880’s in France and Germany, aviation pioneers really started believing in the possibilities of manned flight. The government even awarded a contract for aircraft development to Samuel Pierpont Langley.
Langley, who lived from 1834-1906, was a distinguished astronomer and the head of the Smithsonian Institution. He had long been experimenting with the internal combustion engine, and was attaching it to gliders. However, the expense of making a prototype was too much for him to handle alone, so he attempted to get the Navy Department to underwrite the expenses.
The Navy resisted until Theodore Roosevelt (then Secretary of the Navy) became interested. It was Roosevelt who got the department to give Langley $50,000 to support his experiments. Unfortunately for Langley, both times his plane was catapulted off a houseboat in the Potomac it had to be fished out of the Potomac.
The Wright Brothers' success was ignored at first, and those that paid attention did so with a great deal of skepticism. However, once the Wright Brothers received the necessary patents, they were more secure in devising a plan to turn a profit on their invention and set out to sell it to the military before concentrating on commercial use.
In 1909, they delivered their first plane to the War Department of the United States for $25,000. This sum covered more than the plane, it was also a year’s worth of developmental testing.
The Wrights were not alone in the sky for long, by 1911 there were almost a dozen American firms manufacturing aircraft. Most of the planes were purchased by either the military or extremely wealthy people. The planes were built out of wood and canvas with open cockpits, and were called biplanes because of their double wing structure. They were only large enough to carry one passenger.
The above is just a few words about the very beginnings of airplanes. Cowan covers the history of airplanes up until World War II in her text from pages 250-256. Consider reading these pages and think about the most important event was in the growth of the airplane industry.
