First_Flight

First Flight Alexander Graham Bell was a very curious man. He loved fiddling with machines to find out how they worked. Alexander Graham Bell made his first invention when he was eleven years old. In the year 1876 Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Years later he created a plane called the Silver Dart which was the first flying machine to be built. “[Alexander Graham Bell was an] american citizen [that]was born in Scotland in 1847 and has emigrated when he was twenty-three to the little Ontario manufacturing town of Brantford with his parents. He had moved on to Boston only a year later, but had maintained a deep affection for Canada and had spent summers in Nova Scotia since 1885.”(Beaver, 16) Alexander Graham Bell loved Canada because it brought back happy memories from his Scottish childhood. He got married to a women named Mabel who was deaf since the age of 5. Together they had a girl who they named Daisy. Alexander was an American citizen who emigrated to Brantford and a year later he moved to Boston. Alexander had a great love for Canada and spent summers in Nova Scotia. This is the reason why Bell decided that one of the biplanes that he helped build should be flown in Canada and one did. “The flight of the Silver Dart [happened] over the Bras d’Or Lake...[it]was an extraordinary phenomenon-not so much for when it happened but for where [it happened]. Cape Breton in the northeastern corner of the Maritimes, was a long way from everywhere that young inventors congregated-the rapidly centers of technological innovation, such as Boston’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or the growing pots of venture capital in financial centers like New York.”(16) Alexander Graham Bell lived so far that the American newspaper were days later before they arrived in Baddeck and invited friends which lived in Boston and Washington took them at least three days to reach his magnificent summer home. Cape Breton was a long way from where all the young inventors stayed. Two young inventors in fact were the Wright brothers. “The word [out] was that a young bicycle mechanic named Orville Wright had made the first successful manned flight in a powered biplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, three years earlier, from Dayton, Ohio, has kept this and succeeding flights secret to keep rivals from stealing their technology...[by putting] an engine [on] the kites.”(20) Glenn Curtiss a motorcycle race champion built small engines in Hammondsport, New York and made his way to Cape Breton to deliver an engine he made for one of the kites. Curtiss decided to stay and was the fourth person at Bell’s side. On October 1, 1907 Bell and the four young men went to Halifax to sign the A.E.A (Aerial Experiment Association) which was in other words was to get up into the air. It seemed like something needed to be changed.“[While] Bell remained enthusiastic about kites... Baldwin and McCurdy in particular felt that kites offered insurmountable problems of control, speed, and wind resistance. Biplanes they argued were the way to go.”(21) The first successful biplane of Bell’s team took place in the USA when Casey Baldwin flew a tiny biplane on March 1908 called the Red Wing. The Red Wing was the first public demonstrated of a powered man flying machine in North America. The second successful prototype of a biplane was the Whit Wing. The White Wing incorporated movable wing tips, or ailerons to ensure horizontal stability. On the fourth of July of that year the June Bug was built and piloted by Glenn Curtiss. The June Bug had the largest success of them all and won a trophy for the first lengthy public flight being awarded by the Scientific American magazine. Selfridge volunteered to be one of Orville Wright’s passengers on one of Wright’s latest U.S. army planes. This plane crashed and Selfridge became the first person to die in a plane crash and Wright survived his injuries, but Alexander Graham Bell never forgave him for Tom’s death. Shaken by Tom’s death bell and the boys met in Washington shortly after to decide the future of the association and they voted to continue working for another six months which would give McCurdy time to work on his prototype of the Silver Dart. “...he made his historic flight on February 23. McCurdy flew just under a kilometre at about sixty kilometres per hour,and then made a perfect landing... Just to prove that the Silver Dart’s first flight in Canada was no mere stroke of luck, [he] took it up for another flight the next day,February 24,1909, and [it] flew for four and one half miles.”(21-22) The biplane incorporated every piece of knowledge available about aviation and eventually cracked the technology required for the plane to fly in circles. The Silver Dart was quiet a heavy aircraft to preform as well as it did and ended up making over thirty flights across Bras d’Or Lake. The flight made on February 23,1909, people would look back at it knowing that the first flight of a flying machine was made in the Dominion of Canada.Alexander Graham Bell was an extraordinary man who followed his dreams by accomplishing thing that anyone thought was possible. Works Cited The Beaver. First Flight. The Beaver, February/March 2009:16-22