The Story of the Wright Brothers and the Flying Machine (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

This Kindle edition, which tells the story of how the Wright Brothers invented the airplane and learned to fly, and which is equivalent in length to a physical book of approximately 32 pages, consists of two parts. Part I, entitled “The Wrights and the Airship” was originally published in 1911 as part of the larger “Historic Inventions” by Rupert S. Holland. Part II, entitled “How I Learned to Fly,” by Orville Wright (as told to Leslie W. Quirk), was originally published in “Boys’ Life” magazine (September 1914).Sample passages:(from Part I: “The Wrights and the Airship”)Their next step was to try to find some method by which they might keep their gliding-machine continuously in the air, so that they might gain an automatic balance. The old method of launching the plane from a hill gave little chance for a real test. Study taught them that birds are really aeroplanes, and that buzzards and hawks and gulls stay in the air by balancing on or sliding down rising currents of air. They looked for a place where there should be winds of proper strength to balance their machine for a considerable time as it slid downward, and decided to make their experiments at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on the stretch of sand-dunes that divided Albemarle Sound from the Atlantic Ocean. They calculated that their gliding-machine, with 165 square feet of surface, should be held up by a wind blowing twenty-one miles an hour. The machine was to be raised like a kite, with men holding ropes fastened to the end of each wing. When the ropes were freed the aviator would glide slowly to the ground, having time to test the principle of equilibrium. This plan would also do away with the former need of carrying the plane up to the top of a hill before each flight.(from Part II: “How I Learned to Fly”)My brother climbed into the machine. The motor was started. With a short dash down the runway, the machine lifted into the air and was flying. It was only a flight of twelve seconds, and it was an uncertain, wavy, creeping sort of a flight at best; but it was a real flight at last and not a glide.Then it was my turn. I had learned a little from watching my brother, but I found the machine pointing upward and downward in jerky undulations. This erratic course was due in part to my utter lack of experience in controlling a flying machine and in part to a new system of controls we had adopted, whereby a slight touch accomplished what a hard jerk or tug made necessary in the past. Naturally, I overdid everything. But I flew for about the same time my brother had flown.He tried it again, the minute the men had carried it back to the runway, and added perhaps three or four seconds to the records we had just made. Then, after a few secondary adjustments, I took my seat for the second time. By now I had learned something about the controls, and about how a machine acted during a sustained flight, and I managed to keep in the air for fifty-seven seconds. I couldn’t turn, of course—the hills wouldn’t permit that—but I had no very great difficulty in handling it. When I came down I was eager to have another turn.