One hundred years ago today, the Wright brothers made aviation history on a North Carolina beach, writes Ray Comiskey
There were only five curious locals on the beach that morning, which was hardly surprising. It was a cold, bleak, windy December day, and a couple of bicycle manufacturers, Wilbur and Orville Wright, were attempting to do something that had never been achieved before in human history - piloted, powered flight in a heavier-than-air machine.
To the casually interested, the odds must have seemed stacked against them. In a widely publicised attempt only nine days earlier, Samuel Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, saw his steam-powered machine, heavily financed by the US government, break up almost immediately on take off. His pilot finished up in Washington's Potomac River. The stinging shame, which clung to Langley and the Smithsonian for years afterwards, was to lead to a feud between the institute and the Wright brothers that lasted almost 40 years.
The Wrights had already had their own failures. On December 14th they made an attempt to fly, tossing a coin for the honour of who would try first. Wilbur won, but their machine failed, which was why it was Orville who got into the unpromising-looking Flyer three days later. At 10.35 on the morning of December 17th, he took off on a stretch of sand just north of Big Kill Devil Hill near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and flew for 12 seconds, covering 120 feet. Later that day, alternating at the controls, they made three more flights. The next two covered 175 and 200 feet respectively. On the final flight of the day, Wilbur stayed up for 59 seconds and covered an astonishing 852 feet, before a crash from an altitude of 30 feet put an end to the day's work.
Behind that achievement, however, were no gifted amateurs. The brothers, focused, methodical, practical and intelligent, had been fascinated by the problem of making a flying machine ever since they were boys, when their father, Milton, a minister and later a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, brought them home a toy "hélicoptère".
For the next few years, Wilbur, born in Milville, Indiana in 1867, and Orville, born in Dayton, Ohio in 1871, tried to build a toy flying machine. Largely unsuccessful, they turned to kite making. Orville also started his own printing business in 1888, where, with Wilbur's help, he designed and built a printing press. After their mother, Susan, died in 1889, they sold the printing business and opened a shop to sell and repair bicycles. Brilliant at anything mechanical, they saw the business expand into manufacturing and, crucially, the money it generated helped support their early aeronautical research and experiments.
The death of the great German glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal, in 1896, sparked the brothers to delve deeper into aeronautics. Failed early experiments with gliders made them question the lift calculations on which all previous attempts at flying machines were based, so they built their own wind tunnel in 1901 to measure the data themselves. The result was a successful glider which made over 1,000 flights a year later, some travelling over 600 feet.
But powered flight remained the brothers' obsession. Their wind tunnel tests also yielded an amazingly efficient propeller shape, very close to the standard of modern propellers.
And when they looked at engines to drive it, nothing was suitable. So they built their own four-cylinder engine with a greater power-to-weight ratio than anything else around. This was DIY with a vengeance, and it all came together at Kitty Hawk on that day a century ago.
The world didn't immediately beat a path to their door. Langley's failure had deepened scepticism about flying and the brothers were, in any event, concerned to protect their patents. So they went on improving their machine and making more flights in relative obscurity.
But word gradually spread and articles began to appear. The brothers' thoroughly original aeronautical research influenced work in Europe, where people like Gustave Eiffel in France and Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin, in Germany, were also trying to develop flight.
Nevertheless, the Wrights remained the leaders and innovators. By 1905 they had built the Wright Flyer III, the machine now generally thought of as the first practical aeroplane in human history. On October 5th that year, it flew for more than half an hour to set a new endurance record. When they took it to Le Mans for an exhibition in 1908 it was so superior to European efforts that the brothers became international celebrities.
Official acknowledgement emerged back home. In June the following year President Taft awarded them the gold medals of the Aero Club of America. And the US army, which had earlier told them it wouldn't consider a flying machine until one was designed that could fly horizontally and carry "an operator", took delivery of a Wright Model A for the Signal Corps that August.
For better or worse a new era was emphatically launched. Little more than five years later, planes were in action over the trenches of the first World War, first for reconnaissance and guiding artillery fire, and finally for dogfighting; sometimes even with pistols at eyeball distance. The rest is civil and military aviation history.
By then, however, Wilbur was dead; typhoid fever killed him in 1912. Two years later the Smithsonian began a campaign to belittle the brothers' breakthrough, claiming that Langley's plane was capable of flying before the Wrights' Flyer. Insulted by the institute's persistent refusal to drop the false claim, in 1925 Orville said he would send the machine to the Science Museum in London as "a constant reminder of the reasons for its being there". The Smithsonian finally got around to withdrawing its claims in 1942, and on December 17th, 1948 unveiled the repatriated Flyer with a plaque unequivocally commemorating the Wright brothers and their achievement.
By then Orville, too, was dead. In January 1948, aged 77, he died of a heart attack while fixing a doorbell. Fixing a doorbell, or anything else, at that age tells its own story. Like his brother, Wilbur, he was a doer. And, like his brother Wilbur, he died a bachelor. Flying was their real passion. And even if it was taken further and higher by others, they were the ones that began it all.
In an Irish Air Corps' hangar in Baldonnel you can see the past and present of aviation under one roof. On one side are planes such as Beechcrafts and Cessnas, or helicopters such as the Dauphin and the Eurocopter 135, the paraphernalia of contemporary flying.
On the other, just finished, is a wood and canvas biplane that Air Corps staff have been constructing since September. Beside the gleaming modernity of the present-day planes and helicopters it looks primitive and fragile. But in a very real sense it's the machine that gave birth to the planes beside it. And it also has the kind of beauty that only hand-made objects have; this is something that didn't take its original shape in a computer and wasn't built on an assembly line.
It's a full-scale model of the Wright brothers' Flyer, the biplane that made aviation history a century ago. Co-ordinating the project is Lieut Ralph O'Callaghan and working with him is Sgt Declan Sheils; they're part of a core group of around eight people involved.
The project drew on the hands-on skills of apprentices, painters, fitters, sheet-metal workers, even a tailor, as well as two students studying aeronautical engineering at the University of Limerick. The plans they worked on were copies of the original plans housed in the Smithsonian Institute - a piece of historical irony, in view of the one-time bad blood between Orville Wright and that organisation.
The plans came with a kit supplied by an American company. Mostly, explains Lieut O'Callaghan, the kit included wood; uncut and unshaped poplar and ash - the Wright brothers used ash and spruce - so a lot of carpentrywas involved in cutting, shaping and bending the wood to the design requirements. The framework is covered in cotton fabric, stretched over the frame like the original, hence the tailor. The "engine", which was also part of the kit, is a wooden model; exhausts and ancillary parts for it were made by apprentices.
Although it's a non-flying model, the controls for the little biplane - the wingspan is just over 41 feet - are fully functioning. A handle on the left-hand side works the elevator. To steer the plane the Wright brothers used a combination of rudder and their own technique of wing-warping, all controlled by a hip cradle replicated in the model.
Now that it's finished, what was learned from building the Flyer? "We learned how brave the Wright brothers were," says O'Callaghan, "because the structure is quite frail, rickety almost." And ingenious. The model is being unveiled today in Baldonnel, and in future it's hoped it will be part of a projected Air Corps museum there.
