From archive footage I have seen of the Wright Flyer in action, I noticed that it was launched along a track, catapulted by a dropping weight at one end.
If this is how the ‘first flight’ was achieved (which I’m not sure about), surely that doesnt count as an official first flight, as it didnt take off under its own power.
Was the Dec 1903 flight made with a catapult launch ?
From this site:
“To ignore the performance of the 1903 craft is absurd.”
Yet many did.
Interesting site.
It would make sense that the movie footage of the Flyer was at a time when they were more famous and had started using the catapult.
Was the first flight captured on film ?
I just read more of that site, and they’ve made a few mistakes that I can see…
“The Wrights left no notes”
Pure poppycock.
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~stwright/WrBr/wright_papers/WP_diary.html
“Orville and Wilbur never actually did a proper job of designing a glider or a powered airplane.”
I’ve heard repeated many times that they just cobbled together an airplane, but the truth is that they were quite methodical in their research…when their own experimental data didn’t match up with Lilienthal’s, they checked it over several times, because they really didn’t want to believe that Otto could have been wrong. They filled many notebooks with what they learned, before ever building anything - they always worked things out on paper first.
That site also says little about the gliders they built, in which they made hundreds of flights. They were already accomplished pilots before they ever flew the airplane.
Yeah, saying they didn’t do a proper job of designing is bizarre. It was obviously good enough. And in addition to Flying_Monk’s points they had the foresight to make a wind-tunnel to examine the aerodynamics of their design.
http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/wright02.html
“But with help from their wind tunnel, the brothers amassed more data on wing design than anyone before them, compiling tables of computations that are still valid today.”
It’s funny, because there are interesting things about the story of the Wright Brothers that no one ever talks about. For instance, they called a newspaper to send someone down & see the airplane, but they didn’t believe them & no one came down. They flew it somewhere public (IIRC it was in Dayton, Ohio) & people still thought it was a trick. Not until people in France started making a commotion did people believe that someone had succeeded in the quest for heavier than air flight.
You don’t hear much about their mechanic, either. Charles Taylor designed and built the first real aircraft engine. After all, people had been flying balloons and gliders for some time. This flight was controlled, sustained, and powered.
No motion picture camera was present in 1903 for the Flyer’s maiden flight, but this photograph was taken.
There’s a possibly related criticism that the Wright brothers were very secretive and protective of their invention, obstructing progress. This NPR story from last year claimed that Glenn Curtiss had a more significant role in early development of airplanes. Here is more information on the patent battle between Curtiss and the Wright brothers.
When the Wright’s machine became successful, those experts who spent years ridiculing the Wrights in public had to execute all kinds of twisted “face saving” manuvers to avoid looking like fools. This is a well-known effect in the sociology of science: when someone publicy ridicules an idea, they tend to go deeply irrational when that idea later proves valid. Their dishonesty still infests historical documents.
This stuff about secrecy is one such deception. In reality the Wrights flew their craft in an open field near a rail line near Dayton OH for about ten months. They gave rides. Local businessmen were involved with the experiments. The Dayton newspaper was bombarded with letters from passersby asking why there were no articles about the incredible events going on. The newspaper people (like most scientists of the time) confidently “knew” that flying machines were impossible, so they refused to send a reporter (and they even complained about all the crazy people who kept sending them letters about the flights.)
“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” - Lord Kelvin,
president, Royal Society, 1895.
“Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant,
if not utterly impossible.” - Simon Newcomb, 1902.
“The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances,
known forms of machinery, and known forms of force can be united in a
practicable machine by which men shall fly for long distances through
the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the
demonstration of any physical fact to be.” - astronomer S. Newcomb,
1906
At the same time the Scientific American was deriding the Wrights as “The Lying Brothers” and refusing to investigate their claims. In a uniquely twisted bit of reasoning they justified their refusal:
“If such sensational and tremendously important experiments are being conducted in a not very remote part of the country, on a subject in which almost everybody feels the most profound interest, is it possible to believe that the enterprising American reporter, who, it is well known, comes down the chimney when the door is locked in his face – even if he has to scale a fifteen-storey skyscraper to do so – would not have ascertained all about them and published them broadcast long ago?” - Sci. Am. Jan 1905
But they didn’t realize that all the other reporters were using the same bit of flawed reasoning, with the result that the entire American news industry talked themselves into actively ignoring a genuine discovery of earthshaking magnitude.
The Wrights finally became fed up with this sort of thing, so they took their demonstration on the road. People in Europe weren’t trapped in the same “skeptic/scoffer” circular reasoning as the Americans, and in fact there were a number of flying-machine hobbyists demonstrating their devices in Paris at the time, flying in straight lines for a few seconds. The Wrights strode in and blew them all away.
…
One of the later stories I vaguely recall: the head of the Smithsonian had been publicly ridiculing the Wrights, and even when their machine was proved genuine, he still insisted that they had lied about all their early work. When the Wrights needed a home for their remaining original flyer, the artifact did not go to the Smithsonian, it ended up in a Paris museum (I don’t recall whether the Smithsonian refused it or whether the Wrights refused to deal with Smithsonian.) Only decades later after all the nasty politics ended and the people in question were dead did the remaining original Wright flyer move from Paris to the Smithsonian.
Heh. Then the same thing happened all over again with Robert Goddard and rocketry. If the Nazis hadn’t started dropping genuine space ships on London, I think there’s a good chance that we’d have no space flight today. The “Scientific American effect” is nothing to take lightly. If every member of a crowd turns his back on an idea only because all the other members also turn their backs, then a valid idea can be “disproved” in the eyes of the experts without anyone ever bothering to examine the evidence. Scientific concensus can become a very negative thing if “concensus” emerges like the random motions of a herd of sheep. Each member of the stampede is very confident of the direction of travel, after all, since so many other sheep are going that way, travel in that direction must be very important. 
It’s even worse than that. The Smithsonian claimed that someone else beat the Wrights to it, even though, whomever this person was, he never actually got his plane to work! The Smithsonian, even went so far as building a replica of the plane, and then modifying the design so that it would work, all in their effort to support the claim that the Wright’s weren’t the first.
BTW, the first man to fly a plane in Australia was Harry Houdini!
Not to mention the fact that Samuel Langley (a slimeball if there ever was one) came down to see the Wright Brothers working on the plane, who shared a lot of information with him. He then tried to use that information in trying to beat them to the punch.
http://www.amasci.com/weird/stmlaf.html
This sort of thing happens all the time, unfortunately. It’s amazing how dumb really smart people can be sometimes.
bbeaty, in 1928 the original Flyer was loaned to the Science Museum in London, not Paris. It was returned to the United States and donated to the Smithsonian in 1948. More information here.
As a condition of the donation, the Smithsonian agreed that it would not support any earlier claim of manned, self-powered, heavier-than-air flight.
…And of course it’s well worth mentioning that Langley was the Secretary of the Smithsonian institution. Langley’s Aerodrome unceremoniously dumped its “pilot,” Charles Manly, into the Potomac River just offshore from Fort Myer on October 7, 1903.
Bill,
Do you have an exact source for this quote? I mean no disprespect, but I suspect that this is gross reinterpetation of his “no faith in flying” quote, which was taken out of context. I ntoiuce that a lot of these “experts were wrong” quotes do so.
(and to be fair, in 1895, such machines were very likely impossible given the size and weight of the engines invovled, the Wright brothers were very lucky to be working on their project when motors took a drastic drop in size and increase in power.)
For the record, I have now seen three spereate dates for the Simon Newcomb quote.
Oh, and let us not forget one special quote:
“Man will not fly for a thousand years.” - Orville Wright
I note that Orville lived well into the age of regular scheduled airline service, missing the introduction of commercial jets by only a few years.
I always thought it would have been only fair if the airlines had allowed him free passage anywhere, anytime, as long as there was a seat available.
“as long as there was a seat available”?
Hell, imagine being able to tell your grandchildren “I was bumped off a flight for Orville Wright.”
During the first flight, didn’t the plane stay low enough to be in ground effect the whole time?
