Kitty Hawk, Part II
Brian Trumbore
President/Editor, StocksandNews.com

*As I write this, I am supposed to have evacuated already from my place on the Outer Banks of North Carolina in preparation for Hurricane Isabel. But since where I'm headed potentially isn't much better off, I need to post this column early in case I don't have power later in the week.

Last week I started the story of the Wright Brothers and this past Sunday I went to their memorial in Kitty Hawk. I need to back up a bit, though, and outline some key dates in the search for human flight, then I'll finish the story of Orville and Wilbur next week.

1000 B.C. - First known kite, in China.

1232 - Chinese military rockets.

1250 - Roger Bacon theorizes about human-propelled flight. He assumes the pilot must flap the wings.

1485-1500 - Leonardo da Vinci designs flying machines.

1499 - Giovanni Battista Danti attempts to fly with a set of wings from a tower. He fails.

1648 - John Wilkins theorizes about fixed-wing flight.

1680 - Giovanni Borelli concludes that human muscle power is inadequate for flight.

1783 - Montgolfier brothers send aloft a hot-air balloon with a passenger - the first human aerial voyage.

1799 - George Cayley theorizes about fixed-wing aircraft with control surfaces in a tail unit, the first modern configuration.

1809-10 - Cayley publishes papers, 'On Aerial Navigation;' lays foundation for modern aerodynamics.

1847 - William S. Henson's "Aerial Steam Carriage" model - the first propeller-driven heavier-than-air aircraft design - fails to sustain flight.

1849 - 10-year-old boy makes short hops on Cayley's glider. This is the first unpowered aircraft design to be inherently stable.

1857 - Steam-powered model designed by Felix du Temple makes a brief hop into the air.

1871 - Alphonse Penaud flies first powered inherently stable model aircraft.

1890 - Clement Ader makes a short powered hop into the air with his Eole, but the flight is neither controlled nor sustained.

1891-96 - Otto Lilienthal makes a series of piloted glider flights; he dies from injuries sustained in an 1896 crash.

1894 - Hiram Maxim's aircraft lifts off slightly from restraining rails but does not fly.

1894 - Octave Chanute publishes 'Progress in Flying Machines,' a widely-studied history of aviation.

1896 - Chanute successfully tests a manned glider. Its biplane design and trussing system are adopted by the Wright brothers.

1896 - Samuel P. Langley's steam-powered model Aerodrome #5 achieves the first truly sustained flight. [Per last week's piece, Langley failed a week before the Wright brothers in 1903 in a full-sized aircraft.]

1903 - Orville and Wilbur Wright make the first free, powered, sustained, controlled flights in a heavier-than-air machine.

1904-05 - Wrights develop the first practical airplane.

1909 - First air crossing of the English Channel, by Louis Bleriot.

1910-11 - First takeoff from a ship (an adapted naval cruiser); first landing on a ship.

1914-18 - Aircraft used for reconnaissance and bombing in WWI; DeHavilland DH-4 is mass-produced by Dayton-Wright Airplane Co.

1918 - World's first regular air mail service. William Hopson flew early mail routes.

1919 - First crossing of the Atlantic; initiation of regular passenger service in Germany.

1921-22 - Gen. Billy Mitchell proves vulnerability of battleships to aerial bombing; USS Langley is commissioned as first aircraft carrier.

1924 - Two U.S. Army Air Service planes complete first round- the-world flight.

1927 - Charles Lindbergh is first to fly solo across the Atlantic.

1932 - Amelia Earhart is first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.

1939 - First flight of aircraft powered by a jet engine.

1939-45 - Airpower is a dominant force in WWII. Paratroopers are used heavily by Germany and by the Allies in the 1944 invasions of France.

1945 - U.S. drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

1947 - Charles Yeager breaks the sound barrier in the rocket- powered X-1.

1960 - Scott Crossfield reaches Mach 3 in the rocket -powered X-15; he is the first human to fly three times the speed of sound.

1961 - Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin is the first human to make an orbital space flight.

1961 - U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard is the first American launched into space. He rides in the Mercury capsule.

1962 - U.S. astronaut John Glenn is the first American to make an orbital space flight.

1965 - U.S. astronaut Edward White is the first human to walk in space.

1969 - U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong is the first human to set foot on the moon.

1981 - Launch of Columbia, first flight of the U.S. space shuttle program.

1986 - Launch of Russian space station Mir, which remains in orbit until 2001.

2000 - Russian cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko and U.S. astronaut Bill Shepherd board the International Space Station Alpha.

Back to Kitty Hawk next week.

[Source: "First Flight: The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane," Tom D. Crouch]

Brian Trumbore