Honors Engineering: Week Two

This week I decided to look up the Wright Brothers. The Wright Brothers were not the first people to attempt building an airplane, in fact hang-gliding had been around for years already. Their first flight wasn't even all that impressive, with the airplane only going about twelve feet high and roughly 100 feet forward. The reason why the Wright Brothers were so critical to the history of aeronautical and aerospace engineering is because they were the first people to successfully build a functioning aircraft with a motor. Until this point, all aircrafts were either made powered, wind powered or something of the like. So the fact that a plane could suddenly operate with electronics rather than natural elements opened the doors to all new discoveries.

It wasn't until the Wright brother's second flight that things really got interesting. During the second flight, after some initial problems were fixed and the weather was better, (it was dumping rain during their first flight) the plane ended up going over 100 feet in the air.So while the Wright Brothers might not have been the true fathers of flight, they did understand modern technology better than most, and they gave us the steps we needed to get to where we are now in the aerospace world.