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Invention of the Airplane

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In the 1890’s Otto Lilienthal designed and built over 2,000 top-notch gliders and had a vast amount of information about materials, designs, construction, and handling of gliders. Unfortunately he died during one of his test flights in his glider, but the evolution of gliders did not stop there. Orville and Wilbur Wright were two brothers who were aviation enthusiast and spent their time learning experimenting ways in which they can improve aviation and fly with better equipment. They had kept track and studied Lilienthal’s glider flights, which led the two brothers to build their own gliders. They included new features such as warping the wings slightly so the gliders will bank in flight. They linked the wing-warping controls to a movable rudder in order to make controlled turns in either direction and they also installed forward elevators to control the glider’s ability to climb or descend.

The Wright brothers were very intelligent, had a mechanical aptitude, and were very religious when it came to studying the flight machines. As I stated above, they kept track of Lilienthal’s records of flight and his model’s. Their main source was Octave Chanute, who kept them updated with information in the aviation industry. After that they built their own wind tunnel and used new data of different wing shapes and fixed the errors of the past innovators. They then built the glider as the tool to climb or descend, which led them to build a power plant of 12-HP engine, and perfected the propeller.

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