Western Kansas world. [volume] (WaKeeney, Kan.) 1885-current, 1917-09-20


impatient if at first progress seems slow. Only
men who have tried it know the difficulties of
building a high-power airplane motor"
In the matter of personnel, it may be noted. our
aircraft promoters believe we have q great Supe-
riority the rest of the world, this
1t takes exceptional sort of man to make a
good flyer He must be quck-witted and have the
steadiest sort of nerves. Otherwise, he
grief and smashes expensive machine. Men of
this type volunteered extensively in Britain and
Canada early in the They constituted the
armies that into the battle line without
adequate artillery protection and largely
destroyed. The same forces operated to destroy
the strong and vigorous young men of France and
Germany who would have made good aviators.
So today America is the greatest reservoir in the
world of the right sort of material for the per-
sonnet of the aircraft service. While the other
countries having difficulty in getting proper
men for fiyers-England has invited to send
men to her aviation schools because she cannot
keep them filled-our problem is merely to train
them and provide them with equipment.
asked Mr.. Wright what speed plane we might
expect to develop.
1T is complicated problem, the limit of useful
speed" he replied. "A good many reckless state
ments made the subject by persons with
vivid imaginations. 1t is safe say there
machines the western front that make 40
miles an hour So far speed is concerned there
inherent impossibties in developing
plane that might make high two hundred
miles hour. The difficulty is in the landing.
"A machines landing speed is about half its
maximum speed That is if plane is designed
to make a speed of fifty miles hour it's wings
than twenty-five miles. 1t must be moving at q
~peed of at least twenty-five miles an hour to
make successful landing. So plane with
speed of $50 miles hour cannot land at speed
of much less than sixty-five miles"
From the field we drove to the laboratory. 1t
is simply a development of the crude shop in
which he and his brother together worked the
problem of air flight. The airplane lucky
find. 1t not developed by rule of thumb
Wilbur and Orville Wright of Dayton
United Brethren bishop, after getting through high
set Ill q
natural taste for mechanics and for sports Twen-
ty-one years ago they became interested in the ex
perments of Lilienthal. the German experimenter,
in a glider His death attracted their attention to
his work For two years they worked data
and laws" that other Investigators had produced
only to find that the work far done
worthless.
So in their own shop in Dayton they devised
wind tunnel'-a chute through which air
blast was driven by electric fan, and
work measuring the resistances of curved
faces by wonderfully ingenious method of their
own devfsing. By long series of exact measure
ments and elaborate mathematical calculations in
volving sines and cosines and SUCH they worked
the problem of the curvature of the planes
and of the propellers.
The problems of balance were enormously in
tricate But these, too. they solved. They were
pioneers. They had to discover the difficulties
and then find the way out So they had to de-
wise the methods 1t took unlimited patience
resourcefuness and hard thinking to win success
Both the brothers were primarily scientific men,
They impatient to devote themselves to the
~H scientific side of furthering
~ \ the development of aeronau-
tics. But they necessarily
i1 ~ had to finance companies
~ fight patent suits and
duct the business of estab
&E@Z2 fishing industry
Wilbur Wright died five
y years ago. and in 1915 Or
" vile Wright able dis
pose of his business inter-
ests and devote himself to