Two weeks ago, I began my 54th year of life by watching the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean and then going for a swim at the beach at Nags Head, North Carolina.  A little while later, we went to breakfast ,and then to the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kittyhawk.  I’ve looked forward to that visit since we moved here to North Carolina.

    When I got my North Carolina driver’s license, the kind lady helping me asked what background I wanted on the license.  I told her the Wright Flyer, of course.  I explained that the Wright Brothers were bicycle builders just like I am.  The bicycle connection is the reason I wanted to see the memorial, but I found the whole experience rewarding.

    As you pull into the memorial parking area, the most striking sight is the actual memorial atop Kill Devil Hill.  It is from this hill that the brothers, Orville, and Wilbur tested their gliders and their three axis control theory in the years before their first powered flight tests.

    Kittyhawk has some advantages over the Wright’s home town of Dayton, Ohio as an airplane test area.  There is the hill that sticks right up out of the flat landscape, and there are the winds coming in off the ocean.  There was also, at the time anyway, a nearly complete lack of vegetation in the area.  Even now there is only some small scrub and some wicked little burrs that pierce the toes of your sandaled feet if you are careless enough to stray off the beaten path.

    Besides the hill and its memorial, there are other sights to see.  There are three pavilions housing exhibits and two reproductions of the sheds the brothers built to live and work in while they were at Kittyhawk.  Inside one of the pavilions, was the exhibit in the picture above.  It explains that the Wright brothers built bicycles to finance their airplane experiments.  

    I would agree that the bicycle business did finance the airplanes, but I suspect that the airplane idea grew out of the bicycle building because, as you look at the planes, you see bicycles in them everywhere.  The major wing supports were built from bicycle tubes and they even show the double diamond shape so familiar to cyclists.  There are triangles everywhere in the wing structure with thin wires and thin wooden supports.  They remind me of the spokes and rims of bicycle wheels; so delicate and yet so strong.

    After looking at the airplane and the exhibits in the first pavilion, we went out to look at the site where they actually flew the first powered airplane.  In the vastness of the sandy plain, the markers that show where the Wrights first flew don’t look very impressive.  There is a 60 foot rail from which the Flyer took off and then markers at 120 feet, 175 feet, 200 feet, and 852 feet; the last flight before the Wright Flyer was flipped by a gust of wind and damaged to badly to fly again.  852 feet in 59 seconds, less than 10 miles per hour over the ground; and into a head wind -- big deal.  But as we walked back to the take off rail, I thought, “This was powered flight.”  

    The airplane, under the power of its four cylinder 17 horsepower engine, lifted itself up from the ground and flew for almost a minute.  I was impressed.  Who would have thunk it that people could take off from the ground and fly into the air.

    After this, we walked to the top of Kill Devil Hill, where the brothers tested their gliders, and we had a look at the memorial that our congress funded in 1932.  On the way down, those going up asked us how much further it was.  You could see the top the whole time -- it’s not that big of a hill, and no one was toting a glider.

    Then we checked out the second pavilion where they have a flying reproduction of the Wright Flyer.  That’s where I noticed that the take off gear were front hubs for bicycles.  They ran on the rail I’d seen a few minutes ago.  The hub flanges, sans spokes, kept the airplane on the rail.  And I saw the motor drove the propellers by bicycle like chains.          

    As I watched a movie about the airplane I saw that to control roll, something we do now with ailerons, the Wrights lay prone on the wing with their hips on a small sled that ran right and left on tracks.  By moving their hips, they shifted their weight and changed the shape of the wing.  They called it wing warping.  “Why shouldn’t bicyclists design an airplane that was maneuvered with body English?”

    At the end of the morning, I was impressed with everything except that I found out that after the Wrights found some success with their airplane business, they sold the bicycle business.  

    I took 22 hours of flying lessons in the early 90’s and really learned how to fly a small plane.  I even learned how to put one into a spin and then get out of it.  But, I went back to sea for a few months and decided that flying wasn’t really worth the expense to me.  It is a lot noisier than bicycles and less thrilling.  But today, after starting this blog, I went to church with cycling shorts under my slacks and a jersey under a sweater so that I could leave from church and explore some roads in the southwest corner of the county.  As I pedaled along a quiet road, I saw a Piper Super Cub through the trees.  It was only about fifty feet away on a private grass strip.  The pilot was going through his preflight checks so I spun around and rode back down the road to where I figured he might have enough ground speed to go airborne; it’s not very far for a Super Cub.  I picked just the right spot and his wheels just left the ground as the airplane passed me.  I thought of the Wright brothers as I pedaled away and decided again that bicycles are a better invention.