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. m . Orville was at the controls. The flight only lasted twelve seconds, but it was the first powered, manned, heavier- than-air controlled flight. The W right bothers built a second machine, but their total flying time in 1904 was only forty-five minutes. Then they learned how to turn the airplane, and in October 1905 they made a flight that covered thirty-nine kilometers in thirty-eight minutes and three seconds. 34
The First World War In the next few years, flying progressed very quickly. Louis Bleriot became the first person to fly an airplane from France to England in 1909. Worried about war, all sides began to look at the possible uses of airplanes. At the beginning of the war, airplanes were mainly used for watching the positions of enemy soldiers. Soon, though, there were hundreds on each side of the front line. At first, fighting between machines was limited to guns in the hands of the pilots. Early German two-seater machines were flown by a pilot who carried an officer with a rifle, but soon the officers started to fly the airplane themselves. Because of the problem of firing a machine gun through a propeller, the first fighter airplanes were two-seaters. These either had a moveable gun behind the pilot, or a propeller behind and a gunner in front. Then, in 1915, the Dutch engineer Anthony Fokker, who owned a factory in Germany, invented a machine to time the gun so it could fire through a front propeller. The new single-seater Fokker fighter had a great advantage and shot down many airplanes until the British and French were able to copy his idea.
Although parachutes existed— the first jump, from a balloon, had been made in 1797— neither side was willing to give them to pilots. British commanders said that if pilots had a parachute, they might jum p out at the first sign of trouble. It is also possible that there was another reason. If the British gave parachutes to their pilots, the Germans might do the same. And since most fighting between airplanes took place on the German side of the lines, the Germans would get their shot-down pilots back while the British wouldn’t. In the First World War, airships were also used for fighting. The first flight of the German machine, the Zeppelin, had taken place in 1900, and there were 159 attacks on Britain using 35
airships of this type, during which 557 people were killed. They did little real damage, but forced the British to keep many fighter airplanes at home to defend the country.
After the war, the airship was seen as the future of passenger travel, but after the crash of the British R101 in France in 1930, Britain stopped using them. Germany continued until 1937, when the Hindenburg was destroyed by fire at Lakehurst, New Jersey, and thirty-six people lost their lives. During the 1920s and 1930s, airplanes flew further and further. The Atlantic Ocean was crossed in 1919 by two British officers, John Alcock and Albert Brown. They took off from Newfoundland, Canada, in a Vickers bomber and landed in the west of Ireland sixteen hours and twenty-seven minutes later. It was a difficult flight, some of the time through fog and snow. Brown had to climb out onto the wings four times to cut ice from the engines. Eight years later, Charles Lindbergh made the first flight by one person, in an airplane called The Spirit of St. Louis. The following year another American, Amelia Earhart, became the first woman to fly across the ocean, although, as she said herself, she was really a passenger on an airplane flown by two men. She did it alone, though, in May 1932. She was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic alone, and she was the first person to do it alone since Lindbergh. Earhart made a number of other long distance flights before she was lost over the Pacific in 1937 while she was trying to fly around the world.
In September 1923, US airplanes had bombed the old warships Virginia and New Jersey as a test. Both had been sunk within a few 36
minutes. During the war, the usefulness of air power was shown time after time until all countries learned that warships needed airplanes to protect them, and that the most important ship was now one that could carry airplanes. The war between the US and Japan in the Pacific was fought between carriers that never went near each other. In the Second World War, bombing was used in a new and terrible way. Many cities were burned, and a new type of bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Japan, in 1946. After this war, people looked again at the peaceful uses of air power, and in the 1950s and 60s air travel became possible for more and more people. The de Havilland Comet, which first flew in 1952, was the first airplane built especially to carry passengers. But after three crashes in two years, it was taken out of the air. Its square windows led to weaknesses in the body of the airplane. Although later Comets with round windows flew, the rriost popular airplanes by that time were built by the American companies Boeing and Douglas. In 1969, Britain and France produced the Concorde, the first passenger airplane to fly faster than the speed of sound. Many people thought that the future had arrived, but the real change had happened two years earlier when the slower but enormous Boeing 747s began to fly. People realized that it was too expensive, noisy, and dirty to fly faster than the speed of sound. The future for passenger travel was increasing numbers of slower flights. The first helicopter had been flown in 1907, when Paul Cornu, a French inventor, built a machine that stayed thirty centimeters off the ground for twenty seconds. Then in 1939, the Russian Igor Sikorsky built a usable machine. It stayed up over an airport in Stratford, Connecticut, for one hour and five minutes mi 1941, piloted by Sikorsky himself. Little progress was made with helicopters in the Second World War, although they were used greatly in later wars in Korea and Vietnam. In the world 37
today, helicopters have a large number of peacetime uses— as air ambulances, for police work and traffic control, as well as for travel. The first rocket to actually fly and work was the German V2, first fired against England in September 1944. V2s continued to land on southern England until March of the following year, when the British army reached the part of Germany they were fired from. A number of German V2 scientists later worked for the American and Russian space programs. In March 1946, the first American-built rocket reached a height of eighty kilometers, and in 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to travel in space when he flew once around the Earth. The space race, as it was called, continued through the 1960s; both the United States and the Soviet Union sent up better and better rockets. In time, the Americans passed the Russians and on 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon. The space program slowed down after this, although a space station, Skylab, was sent up in 1973. Eight years later, Columbia became the first vehicle to go into space and return to Earth. In 2004, Rover Spirit successfully landed on Mars. Americans plan to return human beings to the moon by 2020; these people will, they hope, build a scientific station and prepare to travel to Mars. At one time, people used to say, “The sky’s the limit.” These days, this isn’t true. 38
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