Human flight occurred for the first time in the history of our race near the beginning of this century, December 17, 1903. The dream of flight is old. Men had long wondered at "the way of an eagle in the air." Leonardo sketched artificial wings. The Montgolfier brothers sailed with the wind in a balloon.
Hardy adventurers leaped from high places with parachutes.
Lilienthal slid from hill to valley in a glider two thousand times before his fatal crash. The simultaneous advent of benzine and the internal combustion engine, in the closing years of the 19th century, suggested to Langley and other pioneers the application of power to a glider to make a true flying machine. However, the principle of control in three-dimensional space was lacking. This lack was supplied in the Wright brothers' great invention.
Never has a new vehicle been born into a more favorable climate for its technical development.
Applied science and the industrial revolution of the 19th century had piled invention upon invention: machine tools, railways, steamships, the electric telegraph, photography, the typewriter and typesetter, and finally the motor vehicle.
It seemed, at the dawn of our century, that man needed only to accomplish the conquest of the air to dominate his planet. In our own time man has achieved this conquest to an extent unforeseen by the most optimistic.
The Wright airplane disclosed a sustaining wing structure, enginedriven propeller, and means for controlling attitude in pitch, roll and yaw. This basic type has continued to the present day. Its performance was rapidly improved by application of the advancing technology of the new century.
Research and development were stimulated by generous national subventions, and two wars poured billions into the production of bigger and better flying machines.
In his 1950 Wilbur Wright Memorial Lecture,l Sir Richard Fairey traced fifty years of expenditure on aeronautics, world-wide, making intricate allowances for the shrinking values of money and varying exchange rates. The curves of Fig. 1 show that expenditures of America and Britain were relatively modest during the period between wars, but that the world total rose abruptly between 1934 and 1939 into the billions (Germany, Japan, Italy, Russia). Sir Richard stops his analysis with 1948, by which time the total expenditure by all nations in peace