History of Airplane Invention

An airplane or aeroplane (informally plane) is a powered, fixed-wing aircraft.

An airplane is propelled forward by thrust from

a jet engine, propeller or rocket engine. Airplanes come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and wing configurations. The

broad spectrum of uses for airplanes includes recreation, transportation of goods and people, military, and research.

Worldwide, commercial aviation transports more than four billion passengers annually on airliners and transports

more than 200 billion tonne-kilometres of cargo annually, which is less than 1% of the worlds cargo movement.

Most airplanes are flown by a pilot on board the aircraft, but some are designed to be remotely or computer-controlled

such as drones. The Wright brothers invented and flew the first airplane in 1903, recognized as "the first sustained

and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight". They built on the works of George Cayley dating from 1799, when he

set forth the concept of the modern airplane (and later built and flew models and successful passenger-carrying gliders).[5] Between

1867 and 1896, the German pioneer of human aviation Otto Lilienthal also studied heavier-than-air flight. Following

its limited use in World War I, aircraft technology continued to develop. Airplanes had a presence in all the major

battles of World War II. The first jet aircraft was the German Heinkel He 178 in 1939. The first jet airliner, the de

Havilland Comet, was introduced in 1952. The Boeing 707, the first widely successful commercial jet, was in commercial

service for more than 50 years, from 1958 to at least 2013.

Many stories from antiquity involve flight, such as the Greek legend of Icarus and Daedalus, and the Vimana in ancient

Indian epics. Around 400 BC in Greece, Archytas was reputed to have designed and built the first artificial,

self-propelled flying device, a bird-shaped model propelled by a jet of what was probably steam, said to have flown

some 200 m (660 ft). This machine may have been suspended for its flight.

Some of the earliest recorded attempts with gliders were those by the 9th-century poet Abbas ibn Firnas and the

11th-century monk Eilmer of Malmesbury; both experiments injured their pilots. Leonardo da Vinci researched the

wing design of birds and designed a man-powered aircraft in his Codex on the Flight of Birds (1502).

In 1799, George Cayley set forth the concept of the modern airplane as a fixed-wing flying machine with separate

systems for lift, propulsion, and control. Cayley was building and flying models of fixed-wing aircraft as

early as 1803, and he built a successful passenger-carrying glider in 1853. In 1856, Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Bris

made the first powered flight, by having his glider "LAlbatros artificiel" pulled by a horse on a beach.[18] Then

Alexander F. Mozhaisky also made some innovative designs. In 1883, the American John J. Montgomery made a controlled

flight in a glider. Other aviators who made similar flights at that time were Otto Lilienthal, Percy Pilcher, and

Octave Chanute.Sir Hiram Maxim built a craft that weighed 3.5 tons, with a 110-foot (34 m) wingspan that was powered by two

360-horsepower (270 kW) steam engines driving two propellers. In 1894, his machine was tested with overhead rails

to prevent it from rising. The test showed that it had enough lift to take off. The craft was uncontrollable, which

Maxim, it is presumed, realized, because he subsequently abandoned work on it In the 1890s, Lawrence Hargrave conducted research on wing structures and developed a box kite that lifted the weight

of a man. His box kite designs were widely adopted. Although he also developed a type of rotary aircraft engine, he did

not create and fly a powered fixed-wing aircraft. Between 1867 and 1896, the German pioneer of human aviation Otto Lilienthal developed heavier-than-air flight. He was

the first person to make well-documented, repeated, successful gliding flights.