Fresh from successful flights before royalty in Europe, and soon after thrilling hundreds of thousands of people by flying around the Statue of Liberty, in the fall of 1909 Wilbur and Orville Wright ...decided the time was right to begin manufacturing their airplanes for sale. Backed by Wall Street tycoons, including August Belmont, Cornelius Vanderbilt III, and Andrew Freedman, the brothers formed the Wright Company. The Wright Company trained hundreds of early aviators at its flight schools, including Roy Brown, the Canadian pilot credited with shooting down Manfred von Richtofen - the "Red Baron"- during the First World War; and Hap Arnold, the commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces during the Second World War. Pilots with the company's exhibition department thrilled crowds at events from Winnipeg to Boston, Corpus Christi to Colorado Springs. Cal Rodgers flew a Wright Company airplane in pursuit of the $50,000 Hearst Aviation Prize in 1911.But all was not well in Dayton, a city that hummed with industry, producing cash registers, railroad cars, and many other products. The brothers found it hard to transition from running their own bicycle business to being corporate executives responsible for other people's money. Their dogged pursuit of enforcement of their 1906 patent - especially against Glenn Curtiss and his company - helped hold back the development of the U.S. aviation industry. When Orville Wright sold the company in 1915, more than three years after his brother's death, he was a comfortable man - but his company had built only 120 airplanes at its Dayton factory and Wright Company products were not in the U.S. arsenal as war continued in Europe.Edward Roach provides a fascinating window into the legendary Wright Company, its place in Dayton, its management struggles, and its effects on early U.S. aviation.
« … il se dressa, parmi les clameurs des foules, comme la personnification même du jeune Américain sans peur, généreux, cultivé, que rien n’a gâté, que rien ne peut gâter. » Prologue – Lindbergh ...avant l’Affaire À son atterrissage au Bourget, Charles Lindbergh connaît une célébrité telle que son éclat semble inaltérable. La traversée de l’Atlantique se présente comme la victoire de l’homme sur les éléments, exaltant la technique moderne, et une entreprise spirituelle dans laquelle communient...
A Fever for Flight Potter, Lee Ann
The Science teacher (National Science Teachers Association),
12/2014, Letnik:
81, Številka:
9
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Potter talks about a handwrote letter by Wilbur Wright of Dayton OH to fellow aviation pioneer Octave Chanute of Chicago IL. In the five-page letter Wright stated emphatically that manned flight was ...attainable. This letter is one of several hundred exchanged between Chanute and the Wright brothers, addressing aeronautical developments between 1900 and 1910.
Recognising the current and future public interest in the story, the small Carolinas Aviation Museum in Charlotte put in a successful bid for the aircraft. Since opening an exhibit showcasing the ...battered plane in 2012, the museum has seen annual attendance triple to fifty thousand. ...by acknowledging that even ephemeral artefacts can make powerful museum displays, museums open up new opportunities for sharing and interpreting knowledge. ...as the Carolinas Aviation Museum considers how long the emergency landing it commemorates will retain its historical significance, it builds an audience and a reputation ready for future curatorial risks.
The launch of the campus action plan, which we call the Wright Equity Initiative, required the college community to move away from an implicit approach based on the idea that "a rising tide lifts all ...boats" to an explicit, race-conscious equity framework. Cochaired by the vice president of academic afFairs and an associate professor of psychology, this joint leadership between an administrator and faculty member has helped this work move effectively through the different institutional and cultural groupings of the college. The repeated and reinforced discussions on equity versus equality positioned the steering committee to share disaggregated student data by race and engage in tough conversations with academic department chairs and administrators about equity gaps in retention and completion for students of color.
Blaming Wilbur and Orville Crouch, Tom D.
Business History Review,
07/2015, Letnik:
89, Številka:
2
Journal Article, Book Review
Recenzirano
Few Americans can match the honors and adulation accorded Wilbur and Orville Wright. The brothers emerged as great international heroes with their first public flights in Europe and America in the ...high summer of 1908. They were no longer the shadowy figures whose claims to have flown an airplane as early as 1903 were widely discounted; now kings, queens, presidents, and prime ministers flocked to see them fly and showered them with awards. Newspapers on two continents chronicled their triumphal progress across Europe and return to the United States in 1909. Wilbur's death from typhoid in 1912 was reported in bold headlines around the world. In the decades that followed, the Wrights' joint achievement would be commemorated with a great national monument, enshrinement in Greenfield Village (Henry Ford's grand tribute to the heroes of American ingenuity), and membership in good standing in the pantheon of brilliant inventors whose work reshaped history.
Although the Wright Brothers are most famous for achieving the first successful manned powered flight, their innovation that had a revolutionary effect on airplane design was a plane capable of ...making banked turns. Yet this appears to have been an unintended by‐product of their effort to maximize control, in contrast to the efforts of competitors to maximize stability. The success of the Wright Brothers in this effort can be attributed to their taking an approach that was on one hand well adapted to the low state of aeronautical knowledge existing at the time but that on the other hand was committed to the construction and pursuit of principled knowledge. This involved the use of analogies, not as a source of problem solutions but as an aid in developing theory‐like principles. It also involved sequences of increasingly realistic experiments. Their approach contrasts with that of J.P. Langley, who took what has become a traditional R&D or ‘theory‐into‐practice’ approach, dependent on a high level of principled knowledge. This history yields several suggestions, not radical in themselves, about how radical advances may be made in knowledge‐poor fields, which are still common today, especially in the human sciences.
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