THE FIRST FLIGHT.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18614, 9 July 1930, Page 11

THE FIRST FLIGHT.

WRIGHT BROTHERS’ ROMANCE. STORY OP “FATHERS OP FLIGHT.” A generation is fast growing up with such an intimate knowledge of aviation, with its Kingsford Smiths, Its Bert Hinklers, and its Amy Johnsons, that it is difficult for them to realise that less than thirty years have elapsed since the birth of aviation was announced. The Norfolk (Virginia) reporter who, in 1903, had 111 fortune trying to peddle to newspaper editors the story of a flight In a airplane at Kitty Hawk. North Carolina, by two bicycle repair men from Dayton, Ohio, is now in negotiation with Henry Ford, who wishes to buy the original manuscript of the story—a pencilled account written on ordinary copy paper. The story of that first flight ever made in a power-driven airplane is told in “The Wright Brothers: Fathers of Flight,” by John R. McMahon, which has just appeared. It is the first biography of the Wrights, as related from their unpublished letters, notes and diaries, as well as from data obtained from Orville Wright and his family. The book reveals that it cost the Wrights 5000 dollars to discover the principles of flight, and produce the world’s first real airplane. According to the author, a grave injustice has been done to the Wright brothers in that the public has a confused impression that the Wrights are only two of the cleverest among many pioneer experimenters in the new science. As a matter of fact, be declares, no airplane has ever left the ground since the Kitty Hawk flight, except for erratic straightaway hops without making use of fundamental principles discovered exclusively by the Wrights. Mr McMahon backs up his statement by quotations from the court opinions which established the Wrights In possession of their patents. While their suit was before the courts the brothers kept their silence, although foreign aviators were reaping fame in their unauthorised use of the Wrights’ discoveries. He says, “The Wrights kept a relative silence and tolerated a partial eclipse because they were shy by nature and übringing; they became reticent so as to protect an invention that half the world laughed at and the other half tried to ateal. They had no gift for publicity, shrank from clamour, distrusted the press, came to suspect a large part of their fellow men. It was a natural reaction. They never manned. They lived a protected home life with a father and an only sister. They had no knack for business.

The two brothers, Orville and Wilbur, showed their inventive ability at an early age. When Orville was 10 and Wilbur 14 they constructed a woodturning lathe out of lumber from the wood pile, parts from an old buggy, and with marbles for ball bearings. Its "power plant” was a foot treadle long enough to accommodate the feet of six boys. The day of the tryout a crowd of their chums helped them work It. A cyclone came up, but they were so interested and the machine was so noisy, that they did not notice it until Orville saw the bam tip a trifle in the “ a At 14 Orville became interested in printing. Much of the revenue was In popcorn and lollypops. His partner wanted to divide and eat the edible income. while Orville thought it should be sold and added to working capital. The disagreement was settled when Orville bought him out for a dollar, the full amount of his partner’s investment, and then hired him for wages. When Wilbur left the Dayton High School, he took over the business end of a religious paper edited by his father, who was a bishop in the United Brethren Church. The task of folding the papers by hand proved monotonous, so Orville and Wilbur built a folding machine, operated by a root treadle, which gave satisfactory results. . , When Orville was 17 and Wilbur 21 I they decided to publish a weekly news--1 paper, and they built a printing press with a second-hand tombstone as the 1 flatbed. It had a massive roller and a complicated system of wheels, pinions, pulleys, gears and levers. “Every part of this press runs at full speed; it is the liveliest thing you ever saw,” one member of the family reported. | An out-of-town printer, who came to '■ inspect it, crawled under it while it was running, and tried for hours to fathom the mystery of its operation. “I know how the perfecting press runs,” he declared, “But I’ll give up if I know how this one runs.” j The Wrights made their first revol- I utionary discovery from a cardboard box from which Wilbur had just sold a bicycle inner tube to a customer. Orville had previously come to the conclusion that sidewise or lateral balance would be necessary to successful flight—an idea that had occurred to no other experimenter. Both brothers agreed that hinged wings would be mechanically impractical. As Wilbur, conversing with his customer, twisted the sides of the cardboard box one way and another, he suddenly realised that this illustrated the practical operation of the very fundamental he was seeking. As worked out with Orville, this became the warp which, in its present form of aileron, is essential to the sidewise balance of all aeroplanes. The other fundamental invention which assured them of the mastery of the air was the wind tunnel, with which they obtained precise data on air pressure, and the air resistance o Z various forms of wing structure. This wind tunnel, the grand-daddy of all the wind tunnels in use to-day, in some of which elephants could ramble, if not blown out by the draughts, was I a horizontal chimney of wood, eight I feet long, with the air blasts produced by a two-cylinder gas engine which the brothers had built for shop work. The total cost of the tunnel was 15 dollars. In four months, by February, 1902, they completed accurate mathematical tables of figures which proved that the highly-involved tabulations , compiled by savants of Europe and America, at the cost> of several thous- ; and dollars, and solemnly considered I to be the last word in natural science, j were nothing but rubbish. The Wrights, Mr McMahon says, offered to build machines for the I United States Government exclusively, j after they discovered that French and British officials were interested in their flights at Dayton, after the Kitty Hawk success. The War Department rejected their offer flatly, stating that it did not care to take any action i “until a machine is produced, which. ! by actual operation, is shown to be able to produce horizontal flight and to carry an operator.” Yet, 15 eyewitnesses had already seen the Wrights’ ’plane fly for 24 miles in circles, and hundreds of others had seen it in continued flight. The Wrights were forced to market their invention in Europe, and not until j then did the War Department, hearing lof their activities there, enter into . definite negotiations with the brothers.