The Wright Brothers
made the first successful heavier-than-air flight on December
17, 1903. News of their great achievement was greeted with
general skepticism throughout the world. Quietly they burst
of renewed activity both here and abroad. This was further
stimulated by the Wright's triumphal tour through Europe where
they demonstrated the nature of their success and established
many notable record for distance, speed and passenger-carrying.
The heroic age
of the "aeroplane" began now and such names as Bleriot,
Curtiss, Farman, Santos-Dumont, Breguet, Roe and others began
to appear in the news. French engineers took the initiative
and led the field until the end the this era. Robert Esnault-Peltrie
introduced the stick control system and Deperdussin the wheel
control. Both remain as the basic forms of control in use
today. Esnault-Peltrie, Voisin and Breguet developed all-steel
airframes, oleo and spring shock struts as well as the steerable
tricycle landing gear. Bleriot made the world gasp by flying
the English Channel, and so popularized his little monoplane
that over 400 of these planes were sold in 1910 alone.
In America, Baldwin,
McCurdy and Curtiss conducted the experiments which resulted
in the first Curtiss planes, one of which won the world's
first international speed contest for airplanes. At the close
of this period air speeds had jumped from about 30 MPH to
better than 120 MPH, though the average remained in the 50
to 70 MPH class. Non-stop flights of over 24 hours had been
accomplished and such aerobatics as the spin, the loop and
inverted flight had all been mastered. Engines were becoming
increasingly more powerful and more reliable. The era which
started out with practically only biplane types, saw monoplanes
dominate, and bipes again and then, in the Kaiser War, the
"aeroplane" truely came of age. |
