Item #B5814 Experiments and observations in Soaring flight. By Mr. Wilbur Wright / Dayton Ohio/ Printed in advance of the Journal of the Western Society of Engineers / Vol. III No. 4 August 1903. Wilbur Wright, Orville.
Experiments and observations in Soaring flight. By Mr. Wilbur Wright / Dayton Ohio/ Printed in advance of the Journal of the Western Society of Engineers / Vol. III No. 4 August 1903.
Experiments and observations in Soaring flight. By Mr. Wilbur Wright / Dayton Ohio/ Printed in advance of the Journal of the Western Society of Engineers / Vol. III No. 4 August 1903.
The Airplane

Experiments and observations in Soaring flight. By Mr. Wilbur Wright / Dayton Ohio/ Printed in advance of the Journal of the Western Society of Engineers / Vol. III No. 4 August 1903.

Bound in the original blue-grey printed wrappers. Fine.

A fine copy of the first separate printing, the offprint issue, of this key work in aeronautical engineering “from the private library of Orville Wright” hand-stamped on the verso of the front wrapper.

“Using a glider construction of earlier experimenters, Wilbur and Orville Wright (1871-1948) added motive power to wings by installing a 12 horsepower, 4-cylinder engine of their own construction, and a pusher propeller.  On Dec. 17, 1903 at Kitty, Hawk, N.C., their plane and pilot, weighing 750 pounds, rose and flew 852 feet in 59 seconds” – Dibner, 185.  The volume at hand is “Wilbur Wright’s second report on his and Orville’s aeronautical experiments, including the first account of their attempts with motorized gliders.  The brothers made their first powered flight (852 feet in 59 seconds) on 17 December 1903, six months after this report was read before the Western Society of Engineers.  Of the work described in their second paper Wilbur later testified in 1912: ‘This was the first time in the history of the world that lateral balance had been achieved by adjusting wing tips to respectively different angles of incidence on the right and left sides.  It was also the first time that a vertical vane had been used in combination with wing tips, adjustable to respectively different angles of incidence, in balancing and steering an aeroplane…. We were the first to functionally employ a movable vertical tail in a flying aereoplane. We were the first to use the two in combination in a flying aeroplane’ (quoted in Freudenthal, p. 60).” – Norman, 2267.

 

*Dibner, Heralds, 185; Norman 2267

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