history of flying machine



Ever since man first saw a bird fly, man has wanted to fly. The first attempts were efforts to fly like a bird by attaching feathers to their arms and flapping. Those attempts were unsuccessful.

What is an Airplane?

Most of us only have to look up into the sky to see an airplane, and many of us have traveled by airplane to places that would have taken much longer by any other means of transportation. An airplane by definition is an aircraft that has a fixed wing and is powered by propellers or jets.

The first powered air plane

kitty hawk

During 1890 while Orville and Wilbur Wright were working in a bicycle shop, the Wright Brothers got interested in flying. They learned that bicycles that were closer to the ground were faster. They read all the books they could find about airplanes to learn more. They then began building gliders near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The Wright Brothers improved the glider. In 1899 they made a large, two wing kite. After experimenting for a while on unmanned gliders, they made a glider where the pilot would control the airplane in the air. After working on glider experiments they found out how to steer a plane while in flight by developing a rudder (the tail of the plane) and flaps on the wings. With the rudder and the flaps, the pilot could control the direction of the airplane and the height

In December of 1903, the Wright Brothers became the first people to successfully fly a plane with a person in it. The plane flew one hundred twenty feet and flew only about twelve seconds. They had three successful flights that day. In 1903 the Wright Brothers made their first powered airplane that they named the "flyer." It was a biplane (two winged plane) that had a 12 horse power engine that they had built themselves. The pilot would lie on the lower wing on his stomach and steer the plane. In 1908 the Wright Brothers finally made a plane that could fly for more than one and a half hours.

Before the Wright Brothers - History of Flight

Around 400 BC - Flight in China

The discovery of the kite that could fly in the air by the Chinese started humans thinking about flying. Kites were used by the Chinese in religious ceremonies. They built many colorful kites for fun, also. More sophisticated kites were used to test weather conditions. Kites have been important to the invention of flight as they were the forerunner to balloons and gliders.

1485 Leonardo da Vinci - The Ornithopter and the Study of Flight.

Leonardo da Vinci made the first real studies of flight in the 1480's. He had over 100 drawings that illustrated his theories on bird and mechanical flight. The drawings illustrated the wings and tails of birds, ideas for man carrying machines, and devices for the testing of wings.
The Ornithopter flying machine was never actually created. It was a design that Leonardo da Vinci created to show how man could fly. The modern day helicopter is based on this concept. Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks on flight were reexamined in the 19th century by aviation pioneers.

1783 - Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier - The Flight of the First Hot Air BalloonThe brothers, Joseph Michel and Jacques Etienne Montgolfier, were inventors of the first hot air balloon. They used the smoke from a fire to blow hot air into a silk bag. The silk bag was attached to a basket. The hot air then rose and allowed the balloon to be lighter-than-air.
In 1783, the first passengers in the colorful balloon were a sheep, rooster and duck. It climbed to a height of about 6,000 feet and traveled more than one mile.

1799-1850's - George Cayley - GlidersSir George Cayley is considered the father of aerodynamics. Cayley experimented with wing design, distinguished between lift and drag, formulated the concepts of vertical tail surfaces, steering rudders, rear elevators, and air screws. George Cayley worked to discover a way that man could fly. Cayley designed many different versions of gliders that used the movements of the body to control. A young boy, whose name is not known, was the first to fly one of Cayley's gliders, the first glider capable of carrying a human.

For over 50 years, George Cayley made improvements to his gliders. Cayley changed the shape of the wings so that the air would flow over the wings correctly. Cayley designed a tail for the gliders to help with the stability. He tried a biplane design to add strength to the glider. George Cayley also recognized that there would be a need for machine power if the flight was to be in the air for a long time.
George Cayley wrote "On Ariel Navigation" that showed that a fixed wing aircraft with a power system for propulsion, and a tail to assist in the control of the airplane, would be the best way to allow man to fly.

Before the Wright Brothers created the first flying Airplane able to carry a human, there were those who inspired the idea. If not for their ideas and experiments perhaps airplanes as we know it today might not have been. The first ideas of the perfect airplane were the flapping-wing machines, called ornithopters. The Ornithopter is where the wings are providing both