On This Day in History: December 17

The first powered flight

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When you take a commercial flight at times when Covid is not a thing, your chances of death are at the opposite end of the spectrum from your chances of extreme annoyance. Because your fellow air travelers are assholes. Every last one of them. Powered flight had to start somewhere, and even though there was a much higher risk of death than there is now, at least Orville Wright had the seat all to himself.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: December 17, 1903--

Although it wasn’t really a seat, and it was cold as fuck.

Wilbur was the older Wright brother, born in 1867. Orville was born in 1871, and only got to go first because of a coin toss. Growing up in Dayton, Ohio, the brothers attained a variety of mechanical skills via working with various machinery, including a printing press when they launched a weekly newspaper in 1889. But then there was a bicycle craze when people realized that old-timey design with the big-ass front wheel was stupid as fuck, and the Wright Brothers got in on building bikes with the new design that we still (mostly) use today. The success of their bike shop helped fund their interest in powered, heavier-than-air flight. Not only that, but seeing how bikes could be balanced and controlled gave them ideas about how to do the same with an aircraft.

Gotta learn to glide before you can fly, though. And the brothers tested several gliders to get a better idea of how to control them. The Wrights knew of the myriad examples of other attempted aeronauts who would glide, crash, and die; they became obsessed with learning how to steer and land the fucking thing in one piece, so as to not die. Observation of birds gave them the idea of “wing warping” to change the shape of the wing to control the aircraft.

By 1903, after four years of research, including relying on the work of others, and testing with gliders as well as building their own wind tunnel to test nearly two-hundred different wing designs, the pair consulted with the U.S. Weather Bureau to choose a suitable location for their world-changing flight attempt, and selected Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

On December 17, 1903, in front of five witnesses, one of whom had a camera to snap a photo of the first flight, Orville flew for 12 seconds into a freezing headwind for a distance of 120 feet. Each brother did two flights that day, with the final one being flown by Wilber and lasting 59 seconds, traveling 852 feet, although his landing was a bit of a crash.

Of course, there were others who claimed to have done it first, but history has largely proclaimed those guys to be full of shit.

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