The Airplane - Jay Spenser [137]
Creative humans of both genders and all backgrounds have always dreamed of flying. What will today’s young thinkers see and do on this inspiring front in their lifetimes? Whatever it is, it will sing to the human soul just as it has for thousands of years. As Orville put it, “Wilbur and I could hardly wait for morning to come to get at something that interested us. That’s happiness!”6
NOTES
1 CONCEPTION: The Thinker and the Dreamer
1. Charles H. Gibbs-Smith, Sir George Cayley, 1773–1857 (London: HMSO, 1968), 11.
2. George Cayley, “On Aerial Navigation” (part 1 of 3), A Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts 24 (1809), 164.
3. Gibbs-Smith, Sir George Cayley, 1773–1857, 6.
4. Charles H. Gibbs-Smith, Sir George Cayley’s Aeronautics, 1796–1855 (London: HMSO, 1962), 18.
5. Cayley, “On Aerial Navigation,” part 1, 164.
6. Exchange recounted by Cayley’s great-granddaughter, an eyewitness to the events; Gibbs-Smith, Sir George Cayley, 1773–1857, 21.
7. “Airplane Invention Was Delayed 60 Years,” Fort Worth Press, October 11, 1961.
8. Application for act of incorporation, read before Parliament by Mr. Roebuck, Frederick Marriott’s MP, March 24, 1843.
2 BIRTH: Wilbur, Orville, and the World
1. Orville Wright, How We Invented the Airplane: An Illustrated History, ed. Fred C. Kelly (New York: Dover, 1988), 5.
2. Ibid., 84–85.
3. James Tobin, To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight (New York: Free Press, 2003), 41.
4. Tom D. Crouch, The Bishop’s Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 55.
5. Orville Wright, How We Invented the Airplane, 81 (appendix reprint of “The Wright Brothers’ Aeroplane” by Wilbur and Orville Wright, Century Magazine, September 1908).
6. Ibid.
7. Wilbur Wright to Ohio Society of New York, January 10, 1910; Marvin W. McFarland, ed., The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953), 2: 978.
8. Katharine Wright to Henry Haskell, May 18, 1925; Katharine Wright Haskell Papers, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri at Kansas City (microfilm).
9. Tobin, To Conquer the Air, 44.
10. Charles H. Gibbs-Smith, The Invention of the Aeroplane, 1799–1909 (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), 25.
11. Wilbur Wright to Octave Chanute, May 13, 1900; in McFarland, Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, 1:4.
12. Wilbur Wright to Smithsonian Institution, May 30, 1899, in McFarland, Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, 1:15.
3 CONFIGURATION: Shapes and Ideas
1. Washington Post, October 8, 1903.
2. Edward Jablonski, Sea Wings: The Romance of the Flying Boats (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 1.
3. Henry S. Villard, Contact! The Story of the Early Birds (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968), 63.
4. Ibid., 47.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid, 71.
4 FUSELAGE: Of Drums and Dragonflies
1. “Come Josephine in My Flying Machine” (New York: Shapiro Music, 1910), composed by Fred Fischer with lyrics by Alfred Bryan.
2. This mention appears in Article IV of the Versailles Treaty, which specified the war matériel to be surrendered to the victorious Allies.
5 WINGS, PART I: From Box Kites to Bridges
1. Igor Sikorsky quote, circa 1935, paraphrased by Sergei I. Sikorsky in e-mail to author, September 24, 2007.
2. Lawrence Hargrave, “Paper on Aeronautical Work,” Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales 29 (1895), 47.
3. Octave Chanute, Progress in Flying Machines (New York: American Engineer and Railroad Journal, 1894).
4. Ibid., 218.
5. Ibid., 231.
6. Francis Wenham, “On Aerial Locomotion and the Laws by Which Heavy Bodies Impelled Through Air Are Sustained,” as reprinted in James Means, ed., The Aeronautical Annual of 1895 (Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1894), 84.
7. Ibid., 82–113, title page.
8. J. Laurence Pritchard, “Francis Herbert Wenham, Honorary Member, 1824–1908: An Appreciation