Slipping the surly bonds: the Wright brothers weren't the first to dream of powered flight. But, they were the first to put all the pieces together and achieve the dream

Airman, Dec, 2002 by Tech. Sgt. Mark Kinkade

* www.centennialofflight.af.mil -- Air Force information on Centennial of Flight

RELATED ARTICLE: Octave Chanute: glider builder turned historian

Octave Chanute was an American civil engineer who is best known for supporting and encouraging the Wright brothers during the years they were developing their aircraft.

In 1894, he published a group of papers that described the work of others to build various types of flying machines from ancient times to the present. This compendium, titled "Progress in Plying Machines," was the first written history of aviation.

Chanute corresponded with many of the important figures in aviation, including Otto Lilienthal in Germany and the Wright brothers. In 1896, he began experimenting with gliders in a camp on the shores of Lake Michigan near Chicago. He built, along with Augustus Herring, a glider that was the most advanced of its time and made about 2,000 gliding flights without an accident. The data he collected proved useful to the Wright brothers when they were developing their early glider designs.

Chanute freely shared his knowledge about aviation with anyone who was interested and expected others to do the same. This led to some friction with the Wright brothers, who wanted to protect their invention through patents. (Information courtesy U.S. Centennial of Flight office.)

Life after the first flight

In 1903, the Wright brothers had no idea they changed the world. They didn't save the test gliders they used before the powered flight. The first powered aircraft was disassembled and stored in a shed behind the brothers' bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. In 1913, a two-week flood soaked the wood and muslin aircraft, almost destroying it.

And the world didn't take much notice. Ken Hyde, director of The Wright Experience, an organization working to recreate the Wright brothers' experiments, said the media of the day greeted the announcement of the first flight with a collective yawn.

"When told of one of the [subsequent] test flights, one newspaper reporter replied, '59 seconds? If it was 59 minutes, it would be worth putting in the papers. Let us know when you do more.' By and large, the general media wasn't impressed," Hyde said.

But other designers and experimenters were eager to learn what happened at Kitty Hawk. Octave Chanute, the Wrights' mentor and perhaps the leading authority on powered flight in his day, wrote the brothers that they should tell how they pulled off their feat.

"He said, 'If you don't do it, somebody's going to fly and get the credit,'" Hyde said. "They responded that they had seen the results of the testing going on and read all the literature, and no one was close to what they had accomplished. Chanute responded with 'Don't be so cocksure,' but the brothers weren't worried about what others were doing. They were now ready to get a patent on the flying machine, and didn't want to go public."

The French government had long been interested in developing a flying machine. War was brewing in Europe, and military planners saw such a vehicle as a possible reconnaissance platform.