From 1883 to 1895, Lawrence Hargrave, Australian, inventor of the cellular comets, tried models driven by rubbers and compressed air. He was interested specially in the ornithopters, or apparatuses of moving wings, and one of his apparatuses of this type made a flight of about 100 meters. Nevertheless, he began to study other problems, but he did not get to construct an apparatus that could transport a person.

Sir Hiram Maxim tries the control of the air with his giant bird.

Following the experiments of Wenham, an English young person, called Horatio Phillips, whose first apparatuses were helicopters, built an airplane in which he took to the extreme limit the ideas of Wenham, of superposed narrow surfaces. This apparatus had until twenty surfaces one over another , each one of them only a few centimeters wide, having all the apparatus the aspect of a veneciana lattice window with the horizontal tablets. It was verified in a circular track, tied at a post that was in the center of the same track, and got to do pilotless flights of 300 meters in 1893 , using a small steam engine. The most important contribution of Phillips to the aeronautical science was his study on the wings. The section of the wings devised by him were very similar to several ones used later, and predicted its properties with remarkable exactitude

Sir Hiram Maxim undertook the study of the mechanical flight as a problem purely scientist and got to formulate the fundamental principles, with his habitual patience and perfection. After having installed a laboratory in which he determined the resistance of several objects to an airflow and its aerodynamic properties, and to have made extensive studies of the helices and the problems related to them, he began the construction of an apparatus of great dimensions that weighed about 3,500 kilograms and provided with a steam engine with 359 horses of power. Maxim, understanding that without a previous practice nobody could not handle such enormous mechanical bird, constructed several superior tracks that would prevented him to separate so much from the ground that could put in danger his own integrity or the security of the passengers. During a test, in 1893, the apparatus made a such a hard pressure against the tracks, that it broke them, overturning and been seriously damaged. Maxim. had demonstrated the possibility of the dynamic flight with great weights; but its project was too ambitious for the advanced state in which was then the aviation, and served to demonstrate solely once again that the mere capacity to rise from the ground had little value if it did not go accompanied of suitable means of steering.

R-4 model of military tractor Curtiss .

Tractor type biplane.

An exploratory triplane that could fly up to 190 kilometers per hour and rise to 3.000 meters in 10 minutes (model Curtiss S-3)

Hoisting of a hydroplane of two motors to the flight deck of a military ship.

From 1895 to 1899, Mr. Percy Pilcher, English naval engineer, constructed a certain number of gliders, the first ones , very similar to those of Lilienthal, and the last ones with a visible advance on those of the German inventor. In most of the experiments he towed his glider by a horse, and measuring the tension of the tractor cable, he could calculate with much exactitude the force that needed the apparatus to stay in the air. Just like Lilienthal, was on the verge of beginning to work with it airplane provided with motor when he died of a falling, as a result of the breakage of the frame of the glider.

Until the time that we have been mentioning we have had little to say regarding the work of the American inventors and scientists; but from the death of Pilcher until the day in that it was achieved completely the domain of the air , when a man made a long and perfectly directed flight, the history of the aeronautics became essentially a splendid and continuous series of American victories.
The Professor Samuel P. Langley, physical of universal fame and secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, began the systematic study of the aeronautics just before 1890. As Maxim, he tried to go back to the fundamental principles, and he mounted a laboratory, in which he made many delicate experiences. In this time, however, his investigations were limited to the study of the plane surfaces and he almost scorned the big advantages of the curved wings. In 1896 he finished his first great model, powered by steam, and it threw it over the Potomac river. The complete weight of the apparatus was 15 kilograms and the thrust force was of a horse-power. This model, as, practically, all those that continued afterwards, was a monoplane, but with two wings of the same size and one behind the other, provided of two propellers behind the previous wing. This airplane rose from the roof of a floating house and it flew in several occasions a minute and half. After experiencing with models during several more years , the professor Langley believed that it was an opportune time of building an apparatus that could transport a man, and he proceeded to project such a model. Before finishing it he built a model to scale exactly same way to one forth of the size and he equipped it with a gasoline motor of three horsepower.
On August 8 of 1916, this model happily made a flight from the ceiling of the floating house, the first flight achieved by a model powered by an internal combustion motor , as it had been anticipated by Sir Jorge Cayley ninety years before. A month later the apparatus was readied for the test, and the test of launching it was done with the professor Langley's assistant in the pilot's seat . Unfortunately, a part of the frame hooked in the launching artifice and the apparatus fell to the river. It was repaired, and the test in December was repeated, with almost equal result. These accidents were very lamentable, because the airplane of Langley was by all points of view superior to any of the other invented machines until then and his project was deserving a success. Almost at the same time that Lilienthal killed himself in an accident , Mr. Octave Chanute, a distinguished American civil engineer and A. Herring, his assistant, began to work following similar norms to those followed by Lilienthal . They constructed gliders with one, two, three and up to five planes, on which Herring made great number of flights. Chanute, nevertheless, seeing clearly that the deviation of the weight of the pilot to maintain the balance by means of the pilot's body was not more than a coarse resource, left the works of construction to investigate some other means of automatic stabilization. By the end of XIX Century there were still many men of science of great reputation who denied the possibility of constructing an apparatus able to transport people, and several of them made an effort in demonstrating this impossibility. In 1900, nevertheless, none of those who had followed this problem with interest already doubted that the success was close and that the accomplishment of the dream expected for so many centuries was a question of a few years. Just a short time after the death of Lilienthal two bicycles repairers of Dayton, Ohío, whose interest had been maintained by the news of Lilienthal's experiments , began the study of the flight. They found that many of the data that were believed to be exact were erroneous, and that they were themselves forced to construct verification apparatuses to determine those values again. Wilbur and Orville Wright did not finish their first airplane until 1900. This glider was distinguished of all the previous tests in the fact that the stability was not achieved by difficult and dangerous acrobatics, but by the warp of the wings, so the angle and by consequence the upward impulse of a side was greater than that of the other. Thus when the apparatus inclined to a side the pilot only had to move a handle so that he increased the angle of the wing in the part that inclined. Although this idea was not completely original, the practice of it put to the Wright brothers in the way of the success. After consulting Mr. Chanute, they constructed another glider in 1901 and another one in 1902, each one of them was an improvement of the previous one. In 1902, the apparatus they used had a movable vertical rudder for the first time. All the Wright brothers' gliders characterized by the fact that the pilot went lying down in the inferior plane instead of going suspended under it. They learned in addition, after the adoption of the vertical rudder, that this one and the warp of the wings had to be handled shared in common to obtain the best results. This simultaneous use of the two regulations was the vital fact of the invention of the Wrights , who after obtaining a satisfactory balance and acquired a suitable practice , felt themselves to be in conditions for undertaking the construction of an apparatus with motor. Consequently, the Wright brothers returned to Dayton, and began the construction of a motor of 16 horsepower , that equipped an apparatus of the same type that one of their gliders, but of greater dimensions When they finished the construction they took it to Kitty Hawk, N. C., where all their tests had been done , and there, on December 17 of 1903, Orville Wright left the ground, doing a perfect flight of fifty nine seconds of duration. The progress since then was slow, but steady, and two years afterwards, both Orville and Wilbur Wright, made flights of more than one hour of duration. The era of the uncertainty had passed: the human flight was a real fact. During the following years the number of apparatuses sent to the air were counted literally by dozens. The first man to really fly in Europe was Santos Dumont, whose biplane made several short flights in 1906. During the following summer, Enrique Farman, on a Voisin apparatus, made a flight of approximately a kilometer and a half, and on September of 1908 the same man made a flight of forty five minutes of duration. His triumph was brief. The record of the Wright brothers had not received much credit in Europe yet; but in October of 1908 Wilbur Wright took his airplane to France, and before the year had finished he left speechless the skeptics remaining in the air during two hours and twenty minutes without interruption.

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