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Meanwhile:
How about a
little music?
We have a selection of tunes that were
popular during the first days of aviation, performed by Sue Keller, courtesy the
Ragtime Press:
Want to ask a question? Tell
us something? Arrange a showing of one of our airplanes? Ping:
mailto:1rst2fly@megsinet.net
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| The
dream of flying is as old as mankind itself. However, the concept of the airplane has
only been around for two centuries. Before that time, men and women tried to navigate the
air by imitating the birds. They built machines with flapping wings called ornithopters.
On the surface, it seemed like a good plan. After all, there are plenty of birds in the
air to show that the concept does work. |
Click
on a picture to enlarge it.
An ornithopter -- it's every bit as impractical as it looks. |
| The trouble is, it works better at bird-scale than it does at the
much larger scale needed to lift both a man and a machine off the ground. So folks began
to look for other ways to fly. Beginning in 1783, a few aeronauts made daring,
uncontrolled flights in lighter-than-air balloons, but this was hardly a
practical way to fly. There was no way to get from here to there unless the wind was
blowing in the desired direction. |
An early balloon. |
| It wasn’t until the turn of the nineteenth century that an English
baronet from the gloomy moors of Yorkshire conceived a flying machine with fixed
wings, a propulsion system, and movable control surfaces. This was
the fundamental concept of the airplane. Sir George Cayley also built the
first true airplane — a kite mounted on a stick with a movable tail. It was crude,
but it proved his idea worked, and from that first humble glider evolved the amazing
machines that have taken us to the edge of space at speeds faster than sound. This wing
of the museum focuses on the history of the airplane, from its
conception in 1799 to our hopes for its future. Because we are a museum of early aviation,
we don’t spend a great deal of time on those years after Orville Wright closed the
doors of the Wright Company in 1916. We concentrate on the development of the airplane before
World War I, when flying machines were odd contraptions of stick, cloth, and wire;
engines were temperamental and untrustworthy; and pilots were never quite sure whether
they’d be able to coax their machine into the air or bring it down in one piece.
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Sir George Cayley's 1799 design for an airplane -- fixed wings for lift, a movable
tail for control, and rows of "flappers" beneath the wings for thrust. |
A History of the Airplane
is divided into four sections:
The Century Before
traces the evolution of the airplane from Sir George Cayley's idea in 1799 to the
Wright Brothers first sustained, controlled, powered flight in 1903.
The Century After tells
how the airplane developed from a machine that could barely lift itself and a pilot off
the ground and fly for a minute or two to a practical, useful mode of transportation, a
weapon of war, and a means to explore our world and the universe around us.
Doers and Dreamers
offers short biographies of people who participated in the early development of th
airplane.
Wannabees discusses
the controversy of who was first to fly and examines the claims of several inventors who
claim precedent over the Wright Brothers.
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