1、Brief IntroductionThe Wright brothers, Orville (August 19, 1871 January 30, 1948) and Wilbur (April 16, 1867 May 30, 1912), were two American brothers, inventors, and aviation pioneers who were credited with inventing and building the worlds first successful airplane and making the first controlled,
2、 powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight, on December 17, 1903. From 1905 to 1907, the brothers developed their flying machine into the first practical fixed-wing aircraft. Although not the first to build and fly experimental aircraft, the Wright brothers were the first to invent aircraf
3、t controls that made fixed-wing powered flight possible.Story:Wilbur and Orvilles father was a bishop, an official of the United Brethren Church. He traveled a lot on church business. Their mother was unusual for a woman of the nineteenth century. She had completed college. She was especially good a
4、t mathematics and science. And she was good at using tools to fix things or make things. One winter day when the Wright brothers were young, all their friends were outside sliding down a hill on wooden sleds. The Wright brothers were sad, because they did not have a sled. So, Missus Wright said she
5、would make one for them. She drew a picture of a sled. It did not look like other sleds. It was lower to the ground and not as wide. She told the boys it would be faster, because there would be less resistance from the wind when they rode on it. Missus Wright was correct. When the sled was finished,
6、 it was the fastest one around. Wilbur and Orville felt like they were flying. When Wilbur was eleven years old and Orville seven, Bishop Wright brought home a gift for them. It was a small flying machine that flew like 3)helicopters of today. It was made of paper, bamboo and cork.The motor was a ru
7、bber band that had to be turned many times until it was tight. When the person holding the toy helicopter let go, it rose straight up. It stayed in the air for a few seconds. Then it floated down to the floor. Wilbur and Orville played and played with their new toy. Finally, the paper tore and the r
8、ubber band broke. They made another one. But it was too heavy to fly. Their first flying machine failed.Their attempts to make the toy gave them a new idea. They would make kites to fly and sell to their friends. They made many designs and tested them. Finally, they had the right design. The kites f
9、lew as though they had wings. In Eighteen-Ninety-Nine, Wilbur decided to learn about all the different kinds of flying machines that had been designed and tested through the years. Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He asked for all the information it had on flying. The Wrigh
10、t brothers read everything they could about people who sailed through the air under huge balloons. They also read about people who tried to fly on gliders - planes with wings, but no motors.Then the Wright brothers began to design their own flying machine. They used the ideas they had developed from
11、 their earlier experiments with the toy helicopter, kites, and bicycles. Soon, they needed a place to test their ideas about flight. They wrote to the Weather Bureau in Washington to find the place with the best wind conditions. The best place seemed to be a thin piece of sandy land in North Carolin
12、a along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. It was called Kill Devil Hill, near the town of Kitty Hawk. It had the right wind and open space. Best of all, it was private. In Nineteen-Hundred, the Wright brothers tested a glider that could carry a person. But neither the first or second glider they buil
13、t had the lifting power needed for real flight. Wilbur and Orville decided that what they had read about air pressure on curved surfaces was wrong. So they built a wind tunnel two meters long in their bicycle store in Dayton, Ohio. They tested more than two-hundred designs of wings. These tests gave
14、 them the correct information about air pressure on curved surfaces. Now it was possible for them to design a machine that could fly. The Wright brothers built a third glider. They took it to Kitty Hawk in the summer of Nineteen-Oh-Two. They made almost one-thousand flights with the glider. Some cov
15、ered more than one-hundred-eighty meters. This glider proved that they had solved most of the problems of balance in flight. By the autumn of Nineteen-Oh-Three, Wilbur and Orville had designed and built an airplane powered by a gasoline engine. The plane had wings twelve meters across. It weighed ab
16、out three-hundred-forty kilograms, including the pilot. The Wright brothers returned to Kitty Hawk. On December Seventeen, Nineteen-Oh-Three, they made the worlds first flight in a machine that was heavier than air and powered by an engine. Orville flew the plane thirty-seven meters. He was in the air for twelve seconds. The two brothers made three more flights that day. The longest was made by Wilbur. He flew two-hundred-sixty meters in fifty-nine seconds. Four other men watched the Wright brothers first flights. One of the men took pictures. Few newspapers, however, noted the event.
