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Short Stories of Science and Invention

A Collection of Radio Talks by
Charles F. Kettering

INDEX

7.  The Wright Way
    

     As they read scientific papers, they ran across an article on Lilien­thal's glider experiments in Ger­many. So they got together all the information they could find about Lilienthal and his work - they in­vestigated Chanute's experi­nents - and read about Langley. But the Wrights could never be satisfied just readi­ng about these experiments - they had to try things for themselves.

Kitty Hawk     They didn't let the fact that Lili­enthal and Pilcher had been killed - or that Chanute had quit after a careful study and many experi­ments in gliding - prevent them from going ahead. They wanted to fly! The Wright boys - in 1899 - be­gan with a biplane kite equipped with wing controls. It is interesting to note that their first man-carrying kite cost them, in actual cash out­lay, about $15.00. As the result of a letter to Chanute - and Weather Bureau reports - they decided to go to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, for their first experiments.

     You probably know the story from then on - how they made glider after glider - how they fought the weather - about their accidents­ and their inaccurate data. During the next two years, they visited Kitty Hawk with new wings, new controls - and collected fact after fact - until in 1902 they felt they had enough information to build a power machine. Then began another long year's experiments on engines; they found there was none in existance that met their requirements.

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- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


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