We arrived at the Aviation Trail Visitor Center in Dayton and noticed this Little Library in a park next door.
Before Orville and Wilbur Wright created their "flying machines," they built and sold bicycles.
As they pursued their childhood fascination with aviation, they used tools and parts from their bicycle shop to create a series of gliders.
When the brothers realized that all existing data for lift and drag were wrong, they developed their own data on wing shape using a wind tunnel of their own design.
They took to the streets of Dayton on this bicycle which they specially outfitted with a horizontal revolving wheel in order to test various wing shapes.
A replica of one of their first gliders, built in 1902 and tested at Big Kill Devil Hill, North Carolina.
The Wright brothers' success wasn't just in their design of a flying machine, but in their ability to control it in the air. In order to do that, they made several key discoveries and inventions. One important invention that allowed them to turn the plane was wing-warping, a method for twisting wing tips, as a soaring bird does when it rolls from side to side. From repeatedly watching birds fly, they learned to make banked turns by simultaneously using wing-warping, controlled by the movement of a hip cradle, and hand-held rudder controls; solutions still basic to controlling aircraft today.
In the following three pictures, notice how the wings twist (warp) as the figurine moves its hips.
Finding no scientific data for aircraft propellers, the Wrights developed their own theory for propeller design based on laws of physics and mathematics. The propellers were powered by a lightweight engine built to their specifications in their bicycle shop.
In late 1903, they assembled the new airplane parts near Big Kill Devil Hill where their painstaking research, engineering, design and construction finally paid off as they launched the first manned, powered, heavier-than-air aircraft capable of free, controlled, sustained flight. This is the 1905 version of their aircraft which included larger wings and wider propeller blades that allowed higher altitude, longer flight time and the ability to land undamaged. They considered it their most important model and based their first production aircraft on it.
On the final leg of our road trip, we left Dayton and headed to Indiana. In the early 1800s, John Chapman roamed parts of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois purchasing small plots of land and planting apple orchards. His decades-long efforts earned him the nickname Johnny Appleseed and he is buried in Fort Wayne.
Johnny Appleseed, Pat Leifer, c 1965, woodcut
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