Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article “High Over Kitty Hawk, Looking for a Profit" by Paul Hoffman (©2003 by The New York Times Company).

The foggy lens of history has been kind to Wilbur and Orville Wright. We regard the boys from Dayton, Ohio, as American heroes who flew the first airplane and ushered in the age of air travel. At the time, though, the brothers' achievement was barely recognized—and their motives were far from visionary.

On Dec. 17, 1903, the Wrights took turns making short ascents over the dunes of Kill Devil Hills, four miles south of Kitty Hawk, N.C., in a propeller-driven biplane powered by an internal combustion engine. They each got airborne twice—with Wilbur going the farthest, 852 feet in 59 seconds—before a gust flipped the plane while it was on the ground.

But what was really so historic about the flight? The Wrights were certainly not the first people to rise above the Earth. Balloonists had been doing that for more than a century. In June 1783,Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier, paper makers from Annonay, France, demonstrated in a public square the first hot-air balloon capable of carrying a load as heavy as a human being.

The Wrights were also not the first to pilot a heavier-than-air craft. In 1849, Sir George Cayley, a British physicist, constructed a three-winged glider that lifted a 10-year-old child a few feet. After four years of further experimentation, Cayley enlarged his “boy glider” into an adult-size craft and sent a grown man through the air for several hundred feet.

Nor were the Wright brothers the first to achieve powered flight. In 1901, a Brazilian named Alberto Santos-Dumont entertained all of Paris by making a 14-mile trip over the city, including a revolution of the Eiffel Tower, in a cigar-shaped balloon powered by a car engine.

The Wrights were not even the first to leave the ground in a powered plane. In 1874, Félix du Temple, a French naval officer, watched the steam-powered plane he devised speed down a ski-jump-like ramp and sputter through the air with a young sailor at the helm.

Of course, it is one thing to be hurled through the air for a few fleeting moments—what aviation historians call a “hop”－and quite another to make a controlled flight under one's own power. Control is what the Wright brothers so ably and singularly demonstrated. While other aviation pioneers concentrated on how to power a plane—not a difficult task by the time automobile engines had come into their own—the Wrights focused on how to stabilize it.

Many early aviation pioneers employed horizontal and vertical rudders to keep their experimental aircraft from veering right or left or unintentionally diving or rising. But only the Wrights appreciated another necessity: preventing the plane from suddenly rolling because of a difference in wind on the left and right wings. They ingeniously countered roll by “wing-warping"—using flexible wing tips with wire controls so that the pilot can bring the right wing into the wind at a different inclination from the left one, creating lift.

Thus while the brothers' flights were remarkable, they were hardly bolts from the blue. Rather, their achievement was a vital step in a long progression toward controlled flight. And by no means did their success make them overnight celebrities: in 1903 hardly anyone heard about their flights, and those who did were not inclined to believe the tale.

The Wright brothers chose the Outer Banks of North Carolina not just for the favorable winds, but also for the remoteness. They wanted to fly in near secrecy because they weren't sure they could patent their plane, and wanted to profit from it before others knocked off the design. Yet, they expected the press to hail them as the conquerors of the air.

But reporters were skeptical. Six days before Kitty Hawk, a crowd of official witnesses and Washington bigwigs had gathered to watch what was supposed to be the maiden flight of the giant Aerodrome designed by Samuel Langley, the head of the Smithsonian Institution. The plane was catapulted from a houseboat in the Potomac but instead of rising into the air plunged into the frigid waters. News reporters could not accept that two bicycle mechanics with little money had succeeded while the dean of American science, financed with government money, had failed.

The few newspapers that wrote about Kitty Hawk got everything wrong. The Dayton Daily News described the Wrights' aircraft as a dirigible and planted the story under the headline “Dayton Boys Emulate Great Santos-Dumont." The first eyewitness account of their subsequent flights was published more than two years after Kitty Hawk, in an obscure magazine called Gleanings in Bee Culture.