More Questions Raised

The Wright brothers's 1900 and 1901 gliding experiments didn't produce the lift that they expected and had several accidents. They concluded that the calculations Otto Lilienthal had produced were wrong, and Wilbur wrote a speech to the public explaining why he and Orville believed so. A copy of this speech was published in the well-known journal of the Western Society of Engineers. The public was unsure about these boys questioning Otto Lilienthal, after all he had been successful until his accident. Soon after, the brothers's built a wind tunnel and began more of their own testing. Their results were astonishing. Lilienthal's tables of calculations were correct. The brothers found the error was a number in the equation Lilienthal used to calculate lift. The coefficient of air pressure was way off. "This number had been developed in the mid-eighteenth century by an English engineer, John Smeaton, to design more efficient windmills. It had been in general use for nearly a century and a half, long enough to be accepted as gospel," (The Wright Story).

The brothers also realized that Otto Lilienthal's wings he used were not as effective. He had the "The curves of the German’s wing[s] were sections of a circle. The highest point was in the center of the chord, midway between the leading and trailing edges. Wilbur and Orville found that a wing produced much more lift if its curve followed the shape of a parabola, with the high point about one quarter of the chord behind the leading edge," (The Wright Story). Now, what they needed to do was concentrate more on control.

The Wight Story. 14 April 2007. Wright Brothers Aeroplane Co. of Dayton, Ohio. <http://wright-brothers.org/History/Wright %20Story/wright%20story.htm>