The first successful attempt to fly was made in France on June 5, 1783, when the Montgolfier brothers demonstrated their hot-air balloon. It rose to the height of one thousand feet and remained aloft for ten minutes. Benjamin Franklin, then in France, witnessed a flight of the Montgolfier balloon and referred to it in his chronicles. (As this book tells the story of the airplane, we shall not describe in detail the free balloon.)
In Germany, another man interested in flying was experimenting. Otto Lilienthal, in the year 1890, built for himself a queer-looking glider which resembled nothing so much as a bat with huge wings. Remember Leonardo da Vinci’s idea? To his bat wings Lilienthal attached a tail-like rudder for steering. For his own support on the glider he provided a pair of struts similar to the arm rests of crutches. Lilienthal would run down a hill into the wind with his glider. When sufficient speed had been attained, the glider and Lilienthal would rise triumphantly into the air. He learned to travel fair distances and was fired with the ambition to put an engine on his glider. He did design a 2½-horsepower engine, weighing ninety pounds and mounted on a biplane. Before trying his new machine, Lilienthal decided to make a short flight in his old glider. Somehow the glider stalled, one wing dropped off, and the whole thing fell to the ground, carrying Lilienthal to his death. His powered machine was never tried. Other men, however, believed that Lilienthal had been correct in his idea of flying, and his death did not stop their experiments.
About this time in America, a young man, just out of college, built a glider patterned after a sea gull. This young man was a Californian, John J. Montgomery. He worked alone and was so timid that he tried out his glider from a near-by hill at three o’clock in the morning. He was afraid that onlookers would laugh at him if his glider failed. It did not fail. He made a flight of six hundred feet—the first of many successful flights. Montgomery solved many of the problems of flight with little or no funds or encouragement. Because he worked alone and was until recently almost unknown, few written records of his work are available.
All through the nineteenth century men continued their experiments in order to bring to a reality the dream of human flight. With each generation, they moved ever closer to the fringe of the secret but never quite grasped it.
In 1842 an Englishman, W. S. Henson, was optimistic enough to patent his monoplane Ariel for a flight from Britain to India. Though his design had a cambered, or slightly curved, wing, tricycle landing gear, and excellent bracing, it never got beyond the model stage. Another Englishman, John Stringfellow, worked for four years on his steam-driven monoplane. It also did not progress beyond a few model flights. In 1876, a young Frenchman, Alphonse Penaud, read an article that ridiculed man’s presumptuous attempts to fly. This angered the boy and he determined forthwith to conquer the air. Though lack of money balked his ambition, he constructed a number of models which contained many features found in present-day airplanes. Incidentally, Penaud was the first to use an elastic band to propel his model, as boys do. Laurence Hargrave, an American, was the first man to make a study of the cellular or box-kite type of wing construction. He confined his efforts to building models. His ideas influenced the work of Lilienthal, who incorporated them in the powered airplane he was building at the time of his death.
AVIATION IN AMERICA IN ITS EARLY DAYS
The story of the heavier-than-air machines that flew really begins in the United States in the early 1890’s. Octave Chanute, born in France and reared in America, was one of the first men to make a scientific approach to the problem of flying machines. A thorough scientist, he had followed the progress of all flight experiments the world over. He built gliders with one, two, and even five pairs of wings and tested all of them on the sand dunes of Lake Michigan. His most successful glides were made with a biplane glider. In 1894, he published a book called Progress of Flying Machines, which covered all the efforts of men like himself who had experimented with man-carrying gliders and flying machines. This book, without doubt, was responsible for bringing to this country the honor of being the birthplace of the first successful, man-carrying, power-driven, flying machine. A copy of Octave Chanute’s book fell into the hands of two ambitious and enterprising young bicycle makers of Dayton, Ohio—Orville and Wilbur Wright.
