Special Centenary Issue
Powered Flight 100 years old Today
How two brothers Changed the World
by Integrating Faith and Work
100 years ago
two unknown bicycle makers achieved mankind’s dream of powered flight
through the air. Twelve years later the aeroplane was in combat duties in
World War I. Twenty five years later Kingsford-Smith flew the Pacific
Ocean and the Rev Len Daniels was using his aeroplane in Christian service
in the Australian outback.
“Let’s try this again,” Wilbur said in
frustration to his brother. He was trying to work out details about this
impossible skill of flying.
They’d been given a toy helicopter. It was
a frail thing made out of cane and wire and driven by a rubber band. They
called it ‘The Bat’.
“Do you think it will ever work?” their
dad asked them. He was fascinated with what they did with The Bat!
“We’ve tried a hundred ways, and we’ll
keep trying,” they replied. Never give up, he’d say over and over
again. So, at dinner at night they’d pray about it around the table.
That was important to them. “May God bless the works of their hands,”
Dad would pray, and Mother added, “and keep them from evil and
danger, too.” And it made the boys feel that they were understood,
and that there was a good chance that one day, they’d succeed.
“If
we adjust the propeller like this, and if we create a balsa wing this
way,” they agreed, “it might fly straight forward.” Wilbur and Orville
Wright had experimented with flying machines since boyhood. “The big
problem,” said Wilbur, “is to overcome the weight of the plane with
lift, and control the direction of the flight.”
Now
they were adults, running their own bicycle business. Their comment was a
modest description of the biggest problems with making a flying machine.
The gliders they made proved so difficult to manage and so frightening to
ride nobody else was willing to try it with them.
The
past months had brought their gliders countless wrecks and repairs. But
while the machines were collecting cracks, tears and bends, the Wright
Brothers were collecting valuable information about the unheard of skill
of flying. But still their fragile models crashed and broke again and
again.
They
flew box kites on ropes. They threw models into the wind. They watched the
air currents and the temperature. They asked advice from experts. They
joined scientific societies. They rebuilt old engines. They launched off
hillsides and pulled the gliders behind their bikes. They read every paper
on the subject. They studied the clouds, winds, space, seasons and air
pressures, always searching for answers, and every account of things in
the air in their Bibles. In fact the experiments took so long the men
wondered if they’d ever make it work before they grew too old to work.
They became impatient with each other,
yelled and cajoled, argued and complained, until one eventually convinced
the other. They made a device called an anemometer to measure wind speed.
They rigged up fish weighing scales to calculate air resistance. They set
up a primitive box camera on a tripod to record their experiments. They
invented and used the first wind tunnel and kept copious and meticulous
records and accounting.
In 1902 they made almost 1000 test glider
flights, mostly crashing at the end. Then Orville came down with a fever.
And that was all before they’d put a motor and propeller on the glider to
send it through the air.
But they never
started or ended a day without a Christian time around the meal table, or
in their tent on site.
They’d read their Bibles, discuss the stories of Jesus and they’d pray.
And that’s what Wilbur and Orville did with their inventions. They’d ask
for God’s wisdom and guidance in the kind of business they ran making and
repairing bicycles, and trying to fly.
One of their favourite verses said, “They that wait upon the Lord shall
renew their strength. They will mount up with wings like eagles.”
At long last, in the cold days of
December, on a windy sand hill at Kitty Hawk on the shores of the Atlantic
Ocean, they tried again. Day after day, they dragged their frail wood and
fabric plane up the hill and struggled with the fickle engine. They
re-rigged the wings and tested the engine.
Only a couple of men and a boy from the
Post Office were in attendance to witness the first flight
on the 17th December, 1903...
The
Wright Flyer flew straight ahead for only 12 seconds, about 36.5m
before Orville was able to flop it on the sand with only minor damage,
as it had no wheels. Then Wilbur tried again. He flew 53m, then Orville,
another 61m.
John
Daniels took the pictures that have become famous since, as the first
powered flight went off with hardly any excitement at all. But not even
the newspapers were interested, as human flight was thought to be
impossible.
“We did it!”
yelled Wilbur. “We did it”. They had adjusted the wing warp a
little, and depended upon the lift of the wing to do it. “That’s the
first 100m of free flight.” “Now, let’s go home and work on the
wing-warp, and build a better engine, and we’ll try again and again.”
They read Proverbs 13:4
which says:
“Lazy people want much but get little, while the diligent are prospering.” That’s why they persisted. So they stopped their experiments right there on the sand
hills and prayed. They thanked God for giving them the wisdom to try and
the persistence to never give up.
No one else cared about flying. The local
newspaper editor read the telegram of their success at Kitty Hawk with
disinterest, overlooked the advent of the new flying machine and only ran
one line in the paper that said, “The Wright Brothers will be home for
Christmas.”
To simply say that the Wright Brothers
invented the aeroplane doesn’t begin to describe their many
accomplishments. The Wrights were first to design and build a flying craft
that could be controlled while in the air. Every aircraft built
since the 1902 Wright Glider has had controls to roll the wings
right or left, pitch the nose up and down and yaw the nose
from side to side. These three controls let the pilot navigate the
airplane in all three dimensions, making it possible to fly from place to
place. The entire aerospace industry, the largest business in the world
depends on this simple but brilliant idea.
Their secret
weapon was the prayer of the family. The utter confidence that they were
in the will of God in their lives gave them the assurance to not give up.
They did this facing insurmountable odds.
100 years later, we travel in comfort and speed because two dedicated men
discovered the way to overcome gravity by lift and thrust and thus allow
people to fly through the air… and they admitted that they could not
have done it before others, or as well, or as efficiently, without prayer
and God¹s blessing upon their work.
Les Nixon
Australia’s Outback Patrol
