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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:[email protected]
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 ver
one
hundred years ago, Wilbur Wright discovered a method for controlling an aircraft in flight
that history now remembers as "wing-warping" or the "aileron
principle." Wilbur and Orville had already grasped the theory behind this method some
months before. After reading a book on the mechanics of bird flight, they observed
buzzards circling above the Great Miami River. Will and Orv determined that a bird rolls
left or right by changing the angle at which the wings meet the wind, tilting one up and
the other down simultaneously. They tried to design a mechanism that would do this
on a glider, but their initial attempts were too complex and heavy.As the story goes,
one July day in 1899, Wilbur was chatting with a customer in the Wright's bicycle shop.
The customer had come for an inner tube — a piece of cutting-edge bicycle technology
at the time — and Wilbur was idly toying with the pasteboard box it had come in. He
happened to notice that when he squeezed two diagonal corners on one end of the box and
the two opposite corners on the other end, the box twisted. In his mind's eye, Wilbur
imagined that the top and bottom of the box were the wings of a biplane. With a set of
cables, he could draw the struts and spars together, "warping" the wings so one
side tilted up and the other down.
Wilbur had hit upon what engineers call the "elegant solution" to his and
Orville's control problem. It was not the most important discovery the Wright brothers
made, but it was the first and possibly the most thrilling. The elation of having stumbled
upon an effective solution to a problem that had eluded men for centuries was the hook
that drew the brothers on to seven years of painstaking, dangerous work. And after
wrestling with a long series of thorny aeronautical problems and solving them one by one,
they at last arrived at the most elegant machine of all time -- the world's first
practical airplane. |
Click
on a photo to enlarge it.
You can twist a small box like this in one direction...
...by squeezing two sets of corners together. Spread them apart and the box
will twist the other way. Click on the photo to see an animation of this experiment.
Wilbur and Orville used this phenomenon to control their airplanes. By drawing
the spars and struts together with cables, the twisted or "warped the wings, tilting
one set up and the other set down. The set that was tilted up produced more lift than the
other set, and the airplane rolled right or left.
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| If you'd like to repeat this simple experiment, we've
provided a way for you to make your own official "Wright Cycle Company" inner
tube box. Side panels tell about the experiment, explain what happened
afterwords, and show
a Wright Flyer to help you imagine what Wilbur saw. Click on the box design to the right
for instructions. And by the way -- We'd like to thank Louis
Chmiel of Dayton, Ohio for suggesting that we put together an inner tube box.
Elegant suggestion, Louis.
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Download this box design to make your own inner tube box. The copy on the sides
of the box is brief history of the Wright's adventure. |
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