I found myself at a stoplight this morning behind a car with a license plate that trumpeted Ohio as the “Birthplace of Aviation.” Now Orville and Wilbur did a lot of their preliminary tinkering in Dayton, so I might buy “Back Seat of the Chevy of Aviation.” And once they had made a few successful flights, they came back to Ohio to refine their flyer, so I might accept “Playpen of Aviation.” But “Birthplace?” I don’t think so.
OBX Devotees, Unite!
Well, they did build their plane in Ohio even if they didn’t fly it there first. Perhaps the slogan should read “Birthplace of successful airplane tinkering”.
Maybe they should swap with North Carolina. Ohio can be “first in flight” (afterall, the first pilot was an Ohioian) and North Carolina can be the “birthplace of aviation.”
LoL, I’ve spent my life living in either NC or Ohio. It’s really weird seeing the license plates in both states trumpeting the same thing.
Doesn’t the Ohio quarter say “Birthplace of Aviation Pioneers?”
Nope. “Birthplace of Avation” is what it says. I just went and looked at my parent’s car.
It’s New Zealand.
Ah, it was Ohio brains and know-how that conquered the air. If I invented a working perpetual-motion machine and took the ferry to Jersey to test it out, you’d still have to call Brooklyn the “Birthplace of the Perpetual-Motion Machine.”
…but shouldn’t it be France that gets first dibs on the name? With the Montgolfier Bros. and 1783 and all?
Early Out – read a little more about the Wright Brothers before shooting off your mouth. Because they worked out the lift principles with a glider at Kitty Hawk doesn’t mean they made a flyable airplane there.
Aviation afficianado and Former Buckeye
Whatever the license plate says, the state quarter does indeed say “Birthplace of Aviation Pioneers.”
I heard an interview with the woman responsible for getting “Birthplace of Aviation” on the license plate. Her reason for wanting it was that it seemed that every time a character in a movie or TV show was from Ohio, they were some kind of incredible yutz. She felt that the slogan would be a way to combat this. The quarter’s slogan is much more accurate (since both the Wright bros. and Neil Armstrong are from Ohio), and I don’t know if it’s had the desired effect or not.
Tuckerfan– Born and raised in Ohio, and now finding himself living in the homeland of the Apollo Hoax Believers.
Ah, yes, who can forget that famous photograph of the very first powered flight in history: an immortal image of the Wright Flyer lifting off the sand dunes of the Dayton beach.
I know they worked with gliders from the large hill at Kitty Hawk, but didn’t they have some sort of actual motor or at least an official gismo on the first flight?
Walking the path of these first flights is thrilling! So is watching a plane come over while you are walking.
Ohio is also the home of John Glenn and Neil Armstrong. Add them to the Wright brothers, whose home, workshop, most of their experimentation, and the company they founded were also there, and there’s no question about a superior claim to a place whose beaches the Wrights visited for a couple of winters.
If you have objections to the use of catapults for launching airplanes, then even Kitty Hawk’s claim disappears in favor of Huffman Prairie, Ohio.
Next question?
The Defenders of Ohio, it would appear, have a bone to pick with the National Park Service! See http://www.nps.gov/wrbr/hrs/hrs.htm, particularly Chapter 1.
In any event, I see it like this: let’s say that a French couple conceive their child in Paris. Nine months later, they fly to NYC for a visit. Upon landing at JFK, Ms. Frenchperson goes into labor, and delivers little Jean-Claude a few hours later. Several hours after that, they get back on the plane and fly back to Paris. Now, where is the birthplace of Jean-Claude?
By the way, Mooney252, this is MPSIMS, not GD or The Pit. This ain’t the place to be accusing someone of “shooting his mouth off.” The key words to remember are “mundane” and “pointless.” You must learn to play well with others.
Granted. The use of the catapult has always troubled me a bit. Then again, when a plane is launched from an aircraft carrier, is it not “really” flying?
I’ve heard that the first flight was by Richard Pierce (sp?) in the South Island, some months before the Wright Brothers…
The South Island in New Zealand, that is…
We’re referring to “birthplaces” here, Early Out. There are those who object to calling the catapult launch at Kitty Hawk the true “first flight”, but it doesn’t take credit away from the Wrights if you don’t count Kitty Hawk.
Well, calling the first powered flight the ‘birth of aviation’ is a bit of a stretch in the first place. Modern aviation dates all the way back to Da Vinci, and there were plenty of decent gliders being made in the 1800’s. Otto Lilienthal made over 2000 successful glider flights before the Wright Brothers flew. George Cayley worked out the principles of modern flight in the early 1800’s.
If the Wright Brothers had never been born, the first powered flight would have occured within a few years of when it actually did anyway. The Wright Brothers didn’t discover anything. The reason powered flight never happened sooner was simply because we didn’t have engines with the right power to weight ratio. As soon as such engines became available, powered aviation followed shortly thereafter, inevitably. The Wright Brothers were just the lucky ones who got to be first.
Samuel Pierpont-Langley built a flyable powered aircraft before the Wright Brothers did. Unfortunately, it crashed on its first takeoff, so he didn’t get the record. But Glenn Curtiss rebuilt the airplane in 1914, and it flew.
In fact, the Wright Brother’s design was pretty lousy. The canard is a reasonable design, but wing warp? The Bleriot Monoplane came along only six years later, and was a much more modern design, with ailerons, tractor propellor, tail with rudder and elevator, and it flew across the English Channel.