As they designed each aircraft, how did they know how big to make the wings?
The Wright brothers operated a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, and had a good working knowledge of math and science. They knew about Newton’s laws of motion and about forces and torques. They knew that they needed to generate enough aerodynamic lift to overcome the weight of their aircraft. They had written to the Smithsonian when they began their enterprise in 1899 and received technical papers describing the aeronautical theories of the day. There were mathematical equations which could be used to predict the amount of lift and drag that an object would generate. The lift equation is shown on this slide. The amount of lift generated by an object depends on a number of factors, including properties of the air, the velocity between the object and the air, the surface area over which the air flows, the shape of the body, and the body’s inclination to the flow, also called the angle of attack. By the time the Wrights began their studies, it had been determined that lift depends on the squa
