Description:
December 17, 1978, marks the 75th anniversary of one of mankind's greatest achievements, the first powered flight. Though we accept flying as a normal part of life today, it is comparatively a recent innovation. Look at our world just 75 years ago. The beginning of the 20th century brought great expectations. Gas lights were replaced by a new invention, electricity. People talked to their neighbors on new machines called telephones. Henry Ford built horseless carriages. And Professor Samuel Langley drew headlines trying to fly in a heavier-than-air vehicle. Then came word that two unknown men had achieved what others only had attempted. Orville and Wilbur Wright had flown! One newspaper headline proclaimed, "Huge Machine Flew like Bird under Perfect Control." The key phrase is "under perfect control." Men had been flying in balloons for 200 years. Balloonists had visited President George Washington and were aerial observers in the Civil War. But these pioneers were passengers, not pilots. They floated at the whim of the wind. Orville and Wilbur Wright werer the first to control flight with power. By today's standards the Wrights' Kitty Hawk Flyer was flimsy, resembling a box kite. It was a biplane that had slightly warped wings, used a four-cylinder gasoline engine and cost less than $1,000. ] The U.S. Army set up the Aeronautical Division in 1907 to study possible military uses of the airplane. Two years later the United States became the first country with military aircraft, with the Wright Brothers building the initial models and training the first pilots. Gen. Henry "Hap" Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces in Worlds War II, was one of those pioneer military pilots. In his first airplane, the difference between the maximum and stalling speeds was only eight miles per hour! Magician Harry Houdini was the first civilian to put the airplane to practical use, flying his own aircraft from town to town for engagements. Others were also quick to see powered flight's potential. The first skywriting was done in 1913. By 1915 forest patrols were flying, and aircraft carried mail, freight and passengers. In the years since, pilots have flown higher, farther and faster. Aviation records were made and broken--sometimes in the same day. Aircraft were found to have many uses. Aviation has grown phenomenally in the past 75 years. We have progressed from the 750-pound Wright Flyer to the half-million-pound C-5 Galaxy. The first seven miles-per-hour flight has given way to speeds of more than 2,000 miles per hour. In their first flights, Orville and Wilburn Wright achieved a height of 14 feet; Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. As Navy Capt. Walter Schirra, commander of our first Apollo mission, put it, "People now demand flights in great aluminum clouds such as the 747, in which they can walk farther than the Wright's first flight. Oceans and mountains which were yesterday's boundaries and barriers are crossed easily today. Trips once taking weeks and months now are completed in a day. Continents, countries and people have been brought closer together. So much has been done, in so short a time. In 75 years we have travelled far. From that first, ground-hugging flight, we have reached out and touched the heavens.
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