A CENTURY ago it had seemed an impossible dream. Cynics scoffed that it would become reality "only if mathematicians and engineers work steadily for the next one to ten million years".
Atop the blustery dunes of Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina, 200,000 people will today gather to commemorate the fact that Orville and Wilbur Wright, pioneers of the first powered flight, proved the world wrong.
The highlight of the celebration
s marking the 100th anniversary of Orville Wright’s flight into history will be the launch of a perfect replica of the aircraft in which he did it. Watched by dignitaries including the United States president, George Bush, and timed for take-off 100 years to the minute since Wright’s dramatic mission, it is due to cover the same 120ft, 12-second journey made in 1903.
Yet the $1.2 million (£687,000) , 21st-century recreation of the Wright Flyer has been copied from the original in such fine detail that its creators admit it risks being every bit as unsuccessful as the brothers’ initial, failed attempts at flight.
Ken Hyde, director of the Wright Experience Organisation which built the new Flyer, said: "It is literally much harder to re-engineer something and find out exactly how they did it, in many ways, rather than invent it. It’s got to be 100 per cent authentic. If we change anything, that’s not a test of how the Wright brothers did this."
Nick Engler - director of the Wright Brothers Aeroplane Company in Dayton, Ohio, who builds Wright replicas as an educational tool for schoolchildren - admitted: "It’s authenticity detracts from its ability to fly. The Flyer is a very marginal airplane. The more authentic you make it, the more you narrow your chances of getting it off the ground."
The Flyer’s ultimate success on 17 December, 1903, was a milestone that has been described as "the single greatest cultural force since the invention of writing".
Around 25 years previously, Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone and Thomas Edison had put into use the first electric light-bulb. Powered, manned flight seemed the stuff of fantasies, a goal that had even Bell and Edison admitting defeat.
But the Wrights, of Dayton, Ohio, refused to let the challenge get the better of them and outsmarted others considered geniuses of their day, including scientist Samuel Langley, head of the Smithsonian Institution, whose steam-powered contraption flopped into the Potomac River - twice.
The Wrights’ eventual triumph heralded a new era of "can-do" thinking among inventors and scientists.
Mark Eppler, author of The Wright Way said: "From the time the Wright brothers flew onward, the inventions just became so common we don’t even know the names of the people who created them."
In recreating the Wright brothers’ accomplishment, modern-day engineers have shared the same highs and lows experienced by the 20th-century pioneers.
Last month, the replica Wright Flyer - made of wood, wire and cloth - crashed during a practice take-off, nose-diving into the ground after just one second aloft. Female American Airlines pilot Terry Quiejo, 48, was unhurt. Today, she will watch the take-off as Kevin Kochersberger, an engineering professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, assumes the role of Orville.
The quest to perfect a working Flyer has taken two decades and cost 60 times as much as the original.John Haire, who tried to duplicate Orville’s feat on a simulator at Edwards Air Force Base in California said: "How the Wrights flew without breaking their necks is a miracle."
The full article contains 637 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
