Many stories from antiquity involve flight, such as
the Greek legend of Icarus and Daedalus, and the Vimana in ancient Indian
epics. Around 400 BC in Greece, Archytas was reputed to have designed and built
the first artificial, self-propelled flying device, a bird-shaped model
propelled by a jet of what was probably steam, said to have flown some 200 m
(660 ft). This machine may have been suspended for its flight.
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 wings to strap onto their arm or 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.
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,
filled with either hot air or hydrogen gas. 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.
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 early history
of the airplane, from its conception in 1799 to the years just before World War
I. Because we are a museum of pioneer 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 it was
commonplace, 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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