THE WRIGHT BROTHERS SOLVING THE SCIENTIFIC PROBLEMS OF HOW TO FLY.

THE WRIGHT BROTHERS SOLVING THE SCIENTIFIC PROBLEMS OF HOW TO FLY. James Salter has a review of David McCullough’s new book THE WRIGHT BROTHERS in the New York Review of Books (August 13). McCullough is a very good story teller, and Salter, as a novelist and pilot, is ideally suited for the review. Salter describes what we would think of as a series of experiments the Wright brothers performed to find out how a plane behaved under different wind conditions. They built a wind tunnel and “… tested at various angles and wind speeds some thirty-eight wing shapes made from hacksaw blades in order to have reliable figures for lift and drag, both of which change in flight with changes in angle and speed.” I posted here last year on some of the scientific work the Wright brothers did. However, each of their many test flights with both gliders and planes can also be thought of as an experiment—geared to solving a series of real life problems in maneuvering a plane (in addition to the problems of building a plane).