On 17 December 1903, on the dunes of Kitty Hawk, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, history was created. The brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright successfully flew the first motorized aircraft. They were the first to fly so called heavier-than-air machines that required airstrips for takeoff and landing – which in the beginning happened to be cow pastures.
This first successful motorized aircraft was accordingly called the Wright Flyer. A construction by the brothers, it was the culmination of years of experimenting in their little bike and motor shop in Dayton, Ohio.
Flying has been an ambition of mankind since the earliest times. Kite flying has been traced back to the Northern Qi Dynasty in the fifth century BC. In Greek Mythology, Icarus perished when his wax-feather wings melted, as he flew too close to the sun. A metaphor for high-flying (or rather competing with the Gods). Pegasus was the winged horse transformed into the eternal constellation by Zeus.
During the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci experimented with sketches and models for his flying machines (1488). The French Montgolfier Brothers invented the lighter-than-air hot air balloon, the Montgolfière in 1782. Later, German, French, Italian and Brazilian inventors and engineers were tinkering and even succeeding in some sort of flight.
The Prussian general Graf Zeppelin managed to fly five passengers in his air-filled flying machine named after him in 1900. Developed in 1874 after ideas by Zeppelin, these aircraft with a fabric covered rigid metal frame operated on gas and were widely used for passenger transport beginning in Continental Europe and later the United States. The fatal fire and crash of the then largest airship in the world, the Hindenburg in 1937 in Lakehurst, New Jersey, ended the era of passenger zeppelin flights. Nowadays zeppelins are mainly operated for publicity, a prominent operator is the company Goodyear. The Zeppelin base in Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance in Germany is recognized as the first airport terminal in the world. It now houses the Zeppelin Museum.
Another German flying pioneer was Otto Lilienthal, who met his demise in 1896, when his glider stalled.
The first international flight was performed by the Frenchman Louis Blériot, who flew across the Channel in 1909, in his monoplane. That event by the way inspired Le Corbusier for his later architectural innovations, which shall be told in another post here.
In preparation for my book I learned that Rudolf Nurejew, the great Soviet male ballerina, defected to the West during a tour of the Kirov Ballet of all places at Paris’ Le Bourget airport in 1961! An airport which made history in 1927, when American aviation pioneer, Charles Lindbergh, first landed there with his Spirit of St. Louis after his sensational transatlantic crossing (first solo flight over the Atlantic). Airports truly are a place of magical transformation.
A year after their inaugural flight, the brothers Wright moved back home to Dayton, Ohio, where they practiced and perfected their flying machines on a repurposed cow pasture called Huffman Prairie. Years later that airfield would be renamed into Wright Field for military purposes and is now part of the Wright-Patterson Airforce Base. After the death of Wilbur Wright in 1912, Orville retired from airplane constructing and sold his shares to his competitor Glenn Curtiss, whose Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company turned into the Curtiss-Wright Corporation and constructed aircraft for the military and Navy.
The aviator Charles Lindbergh started out as a military officer and air mail pilot. When he returned to the US after his pioneering flight to Europe, he stated that American airports were far behind the European ones in terms of development. Hence he set out to tour the US with his Spirit of St. Louis to promote aviation and infrastructure and partnered with Henry Ford. Ford, the inventor of the assembly line and of the famously successful Model T automobile (1909) aimed to expand his mobility enterprise into aviation. For his subsequent Tri-Motor airplane he hired Lindbergh as his test pilot and had an airport built on the grounds of his factory in Dearborn, Michigan.
Ford Dearborn Airport, completed in 1926 by Albert Kahn, who had also designed Ford’s factories, was the first airport built with permanent concrete runways, flood light, a restaurant and hotel. At Dearborn, the entrepreneur Ford not only built cars and planes but also provided their stage – an airport!
Lindbergh was the catalyst for the aviation and airport building boom of the “Roaring Twenties”.
Sources:
Wright Flyer, First Flight, photograph courtesy of John T. Daniels, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Hugh Pearman, Airports: A Century of Architecture, 2004.
Alastair Gordon, The Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s most Revolutionary Structure, 2004.
https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/deutscher-zeppelin-erst-lz-126-dann-zr-3-a-947791.html
