Inventors in History: The Wright Brothers
Inventors in History: The Wright Brothers
A model of a Wright brothers airplane is hanging up here at the Intellectual Ventures Lab and I decided to do some research and figure out what made these two brothers special.
They didn’t just start with flight though, they stumbled into it. They started with a printing press publishing a journal and when bikes started getting popular, they had some tools and so they added bikes to their workshop. Later, because they had the tools for bikes, they could start experiment with gliders. They saw some photos of Otto Lilienthal’s glider and got inspired to get into pushing the frontier of flight forward. Projects that inspire projects is something I’ve noticed at the Intellectual Ventures Lab…. Getting the tools to make one project happen can result in innovation around other projects!
They started with gliders specifically because they wanted to get the controls working for gliders before they added an engine. They knew that the engine could be added later and that wing designs existed and so they focused on the control system first. It was the missing link to manned flight at the time. With their experience as bike builders, they knew that if you couldn’t control a bike it would fall over and people would get hurt and the same was true for airplanes, with more disastrous results!
They had many failures. On one trip home, stung with disappointment, Wilbur told Orville that man would fly, but not in their lifetimes. They went home and decided that it was too expensive to keep building full size prototypes and conjectured that something was wrong with Lilienthal’s math.
They had figured out the basic control mechanism that defined the framework for flight control and is still in use today but with the solution to one problem, another arose! They found that their wings didn’t work the way they predicted and so they abandoned Lilienthal’s math in favor of their own research and built a wind tunnel that they used to test over 200 wing designs before settling on the designs that worked best for them. Their wind tunnel was a nest of bicycle spokes and weights that allowed them to understand the lift properties of wings . They also created all sorts of contraptions that they could attach onto their bikes to test the lifting properties of different wing designs. At that point, they had focused their ideas and could they could iterate faster on a small scale and that allowed them to push forward and make their design work and then they scaled it up to take to the air!
Want to learn more? Here’s the wikipedia page and a page about their wind tunnel that I found helpful in my research!
Are there inventor stories that have inspired you? Drop me a note in the comments or write up your own blog post. I’d love to hear them!
It is amazing that today, almost 100 years after the first flight of the Wright Flyer, groups of engineers, scientists, pilots, and others can gather together and have a spirited debate on how an airplane wing generates lift. Various explanations are put forth, and the debate centers on which explanation is the most fundamental.
John D. Anderson
The Wright brothers were intelligent and methodical when they tried to create a science of aerodynamics but they made an unfortunate and incorrect assumption that their small scale winf tunnel experiments applied directly to larger: human-scale flight. In fact air viscosity has a much greater effect at small scales and this lead them to design thinner aerofoils than they should have and the thicker aerofoil that they started with was actually better than the one they “optimised”.
Have a look at vertical axis wind turbine design if you want to see where scale effects and complex aerodynamic interactions are still testing the science of aerodynmics.
PBS’s Nova documentary of Alberto Santos Dumont, Wings of Madness, is also an inspiring inventor story in the field of flight !
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/santos/about.html
These guys were amazing, their passion, drive and very sound approach to trying to solve heaver then air controlled flight, is inspirational. What was also great were the people who were driven to help the Wright brothers too. The mechanic who built the engine they used is another example to people driven to success for the right reasons. He knew his tools materials and was able to take a creative approach to solving the weight to horse power issues. I think it’s a a must story for inventors.