Wright Brothers

Fantastic morning at the field where the Wright Brothers first achieved powered human flight...
...a brilliant museum with this great art deco memorial on Kill Devil Hill (down which they took a memorable failed attempt to fly which nearly killed Wilbur!)

Their self-taught engineering was quite remarkable, and their perseverance too. Unlike the reverse story later in the century, it was the Americans who did not want to invest in the new technology and so they travelled to Europe to get some more funding. Poor old Frank Whittle had the opposite journey with the jet engine just a few short decades later.

I was delighted to learn that they thought that the power bit was the easy part, and that control was king, so they did some 600 test glide flights to get the plane structure correct, and tested 200 wing designs in their tiny wind tunnel... before they got to fly the kitty Hawk with its (light) engine, which they also built... wonderful endeavour...

And as it says in the museum... from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in 66 years....