from the Wright Brothers up to 1909. just the first decade
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The primitive biplane circled the course over Long Island’s Hempstead Plains ten times, covering fifteen miles, and then came down. The pilot was hungry. As Glenn Curtis put it: “I felt hungry and it was time for breakfast. Even an aeroplanist has to eat, and after making ten evolutions of the [...]
The Farman III (or Farman 3) was the first airplane to use ailerons (or flaps) as control surfaces, a great improvement over the Wrights’ method wing-warping.
Henri Farman had purchased a biplane, the Voisin-Farman I, from the Voisin company, and was ready to buy another, but Voisin sold Farman’s plane to another customer. Angered, Farman [...]
The great inventor Alexander Graham Bell, by then extremely wealthy, established the Aerial Experiment Association (AEA) in October 1907 to bring bright young engineers together in a creative environment. The AEA, composed of Bell as mentor, Douglas McCurdy, Frederick Baldwin, Lt. Thomas Selfridge, and Glenn Curtiss, went on to build aircraft as a team [...]
In 1906-07, the Voisin brothers had designed and built a pusher biplane, powered by an Antoinette V-8 engine, that took off on wheels and flew reasonably well. Purchased and modified by French aviation pioneer Henri Farman, a Voisin biplane, in January 1908, became the first airplane in Europe to fly a one kilometer circuit. Later [...]
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Louis Bleriot rose at 2:30 in the morning in July 25, 1909, and, found that the conditions were favorable for his flight that day. He ordered the torpedo boat destroyer Escopette, which had been placed at his disposal by the French Government, to start. Then he went to the garage at Sangatte [...]
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Charles and Gabriel Voisin were France’s answer to the Wright Brothers. In 1904, they established a factory for the production of gliders and experimental machines, designing primitive biplanes in 1906. Having constructed a power machine for Leon Delagrange, Charles Voisin made his first power flight in it, a short hop of [...]
On the fall day of November 12, 1906, Parisians saw something that they had become accustomed. The Brazilian engineer, Alberto Santos-Dumont was attempting to fly again.
He continued his series of experiments with his nearly-perfected aeroplane, the 14-Bis (also known as the ‘Bird of Prey’), in the Bois de Boulogne that morning, making two flights of [...]
On December 17, 1903, over the wind-swept barrier island of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the Orville Wright became the first man to fly. “To fly,” in the precise terminology of the FAI, meant “the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight”. The Wright Flyer was the first powered aircraft designed and built [...]
