Michael Krakalovich, age 12, of Nashville, Tenn., for his question:
HOW LARGE WAS THE WRIGHT BROTHERS' FIRST AIRPLANE?
Orville and Wilbur Wright invented and built the first successful airplane. On Dec. 17, 1903, they made the worlds first flight in a power driven, heavier than air machine that had wings 40 and a half feet long. The airplane weighed about 750 pounds with the pilot. It had been built at a cost of less than $1,000.
That first flight was made at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Orville piloted the planes, having won the privilege by the toss of a coin.
The famous first flight saw the airplane travel 120 feet and it remained in the air for all of 12 seconds. The brothers made three more flights that day. The longest, by Wilbur, was 852 feet in 59 seconds.
Five persons besides the brothers Wright witnessed those first flights. And only three or four newspapers reported the event the next morning.
The Wrights continued their experiments at a field near Dayton, Ohio, in 1904 and 1905. In 1904 they made 105 flights, but totaled only 45 minutes in the air. Two flights lasted five minutes each.
On October 5, 1905, the machine flew 24.2 miles in 38 minutes and three seconds.
When the Wrights first offered their machine to the United States government, they were not taken seriously. But by 1908 they closed a contract with the U.S. Department of War for the first military airplane.
In 1896, the brothers had become interested in flying. They tested their first man carrying glider at Kitty Hawk in 1900. It measured 16 feet from wing tip to wing tip and cost $15 to build. They returned to Kitty Hawk in 1901 with a larger glider. But neither glider had the lifting power they had counted on.
The brothers then set up a six foot wind tunnel in their shop and started experiments.
The experiments in the Wright brothers' shop were with model wings. They tested more than 200 wing models in the wind tunnel. From the results of their tests, they made the first reliable tables of air pressure on curved surfaces.
These tables made it possible for them to design a machine that could fly.
The brothers built a third glider and took it to Kitty Hawk in the summer of 1902. This glider, based on their new figures, had aerodynamic qualities far in advance of any tried before. With it, they solved most of the problems of balance in flight.
The Wrights made nearly 1,000 glides in this model and, on some, covered distances of more than 600 feet. Their basic patent, applied for in 1903, relates to the 1902 glider.
In their 1903 power driven heavier than air machine, they designed and built their own lightweight gasoline engine.
In 1903 the brothers formed the Wright Company in New York City to manufacture airplanes.