chapter six- princeton university- home（第六章-普林斯顿大学-首页）.docVIP

Chapter Six AIRPLANE: WILBUR AND ORVILLE WRIGHT The age of powered air travel began when the Wright brothers flew an experimental airplane for twelve seconds on the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903. Today millions of Americans fly every day. In 1939 passenger air travel was still a luxury. But the airplane of the Wright Brothers, the first powered heavier-than-air craft to fly a pilot in sustained level flight, was the crucial breakthrough that made later aircraft possible. Unlike earlier would-be aviators who thought the problem of flight was how to get off the ground, the Wrights studied how to stay in the air, using gliders. Their focus on how to stay aloft led them to see that an airplane needed manueverability as well as power. The Wrights made accurate measurements of how various parts of an airplane would perform. After testing several aircraft designs as gliders, they assembled an airplane and successfully flew it on December 17, 1903. Early Attempts to Fly Before the modern era, people imagined flying like birds. Leonardo DaVinci envisioned human flight by means of artificial wings flapped by arms and legs, but attempts to fly in this way failed. In 1783, the Montgolfier brothers in France flew a hot-air balloon, and in the same year Professor J.A.C. Charles of France flew a hydrogen-filled balloon. But lighter-than-air craft provided little experience of use to heavier-than-air flight, and interest in the latter came only with the new spirit of engineering inquiry that marked the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century.1 Modern aviation began in 1799, when an English landowner, Sir George Cayley (1773-1857), sketched the basic design that airplanes have followed ever since: a fixed lateral wing across a longitudinal body, with a cross-wing tail and a vertical rudder. Cayley understood that an airplane needs to develop enough forward force, or thrust, to overcome the resistance of the air, or drag. He also r