A modern audience could note how the genius of Daedalus, using observation to mimic birds' wing shapes, was rendered irrelevant by his son's reckless behavior. Passion defeated by reality was a lesson that would-be aeronauts would discover repeatedly, frequently at a high price. This essay summarizes the history of heavierthan-air, fixed-wing powered aircraft.
Orville and Wilbur Wright had many self-taught engineer-inventor contemporaries who worked through repeated failures. The Wright brothers were partly inspired by the glider experiments of the German Otto Lilienthal and the Scottish engineer Percy Pilcher. Although these persons died while testing gliders of their own design, both thought one secret of flight was the curved wing, and they published their findings. The Wrights based their design on that principle, created a steering mechanism, and added a 12-horsepower motor.
On December 17, 1903, their 750-pound plane launched from a railroad track at less than seven miles per hour, attained an altitude of perhaps ten feet, and landed after 120 feet. That beginning led to a new world in which gravity, while impossible to ignore, could be successfully challenged and even, less than seventy years later, overcome as humans traveled to land on the moon. This flight was challenged for decades in the press and the courts, since wealth and fame would follow those who were actually first. Gabriel Voisin, who along with his brother, Charles, was the first to build aircraft in France on a commercial basis, scoffed at the influence of the Wright brothers and other aviation pioneers. Nonetheless, the early trickle of aviation pioneers soon grew to a swarm.
A company founded by Glenn Curtiss made the first commercial sale of an aircraft in 1909 to the Aeronautic Society of New York. In the same year, one of the Wright brothers succeeded in meeting U.S. Army specifications for an aircraft and sold it to the government for $30,000. The Wrights promptly sued Curtiss for patent infringement, virtually freezing the aircraft industry in the United States until World War I.
Despite several impressive demonstration flights the Wrights performed for the U.S. Army, its officials were unmoved. The Wrights took their product to Europe, where they demonstrated in front of German, French, and British armed forces. In the process, they sparked attention with European pioneers of aviation as Marcel Dassault, Anthony Fokker, Louis Blériot and Willy Messerschmidt. Aviation made for good entertainment. Blériot and others such as Louis Paulhan built their own airplanes and began touring flying circuses in the first decade of the twentieth century. With the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914, France and Germany were quick to apply aviation to the battlefield, producing the world's first aces, Roland Garros and Manfred von Richthoven. The United States Army embraced air power in 1914 by creating an aviation group within the Signal Corps.
The aircraft industry received a tremendous boost in 1927 when Charles Lindbergh had a first successful trans-Atlantic ferry flight using with a Ryan Aeronautics tri-motor by enlarging its fuel tank. Lindbergh's brave and almost deadly stunt so strongly improve interest in aviation that investments of millions of dollars pumped into aircraft companies. In August of 1929, Allan Loughead and Fred Keeler sold the Lockheed Company to a group of automotive investors calling themselves the Detroit Aircraft Company. The company drew tremendous investor interest after aviatrix Amelia Earhart crossed the Atlantic with one of the company's Vegas aircraft. One month later, world financial markets were buffeted by the stock market crash that plunged the nation into the Great Depression. Aviation company stocks, valued at more than $1 billion on total earnings of more than $9 billion, were decimated. The Depression would have destroyed the aircraft industry were it not for government support. It became official policy to award contracts to an increasingly privileged club of manufacturers, so that their expertise could be preserved and developed for military purposes. American aviation was controlled by three huge vertical monopolies, each maintaining huge airframe and engine manufacturing facilities and airline services.
While military preparations were stepped up in the 1940s, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, sparked tremendous growth in the aircraft industry. Huge amounts of government money were poured into engineering and production facilities. President Roosevelt ordered 60,000 aircraft in 1942 and 125,000 the year after.
Emerging from the war with tremendous manufacturing capacity and engineering talent, the Douglas, Boeing, and Lockheed companies dominated the commercial aircraft industry. Competitors, including Curtiss, Martin, and Convair, were forced to exit the market in rapid succession, taking refuge in the more protected military businesses. Hughes Aircraft, famed for its massive Spruce Goose amphibian freighter, failed to break into the production market.
With fixed-wing designs having reached the peak of their development in the 1960s, we can glance back to the early Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci, who drew many flying machine designs. Whether any of these devices were constructed remains a matter of debate, but it is clear from his notebooks that human-powered flight fascinated da Vinci. However, the only materials he had access to were hardwoods and linen, and they were too dense to support this dream. Almost five centuries later, and bringing matters neatly full-circle, in 1977 the Gossamer Condor, built mostly of lightweight plastics, enabled the first human-powered flight.
