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Lilienthal, are betweenthem credited with having worked out the basic principles of aerodynamics and control. However, as the Wright brothers themselves acknowledged, credit for that actually belonged to an extraordinary Englishman, George Cayley, who was born in 1773. He was the first person known to have worked out that the four main forces acting on any aircraft as pairs of opposites are gravity and lift, thrust and drag. He also designed the first cambered wing for generating lift; this became the standard aircraft wing shape such as the Wrights tested in their wind tunnel and which has persisted to the present day. Cayley first constructed and flew a model glider as early as 1804, and in 1853 an employee of his bravely made the first manned glider flight in one of Cayley’s designs at Brompton Dale in Yorkshire, nearly half a century before Lilienthal’s experiments with what were essentially the first hang-gliders. Modern replicas of Cayley’s glider have since been flown successfully in Britain and America to prove that, primitive or not, it really had worked.
    As the Wrights and their contemporaries in Europe had learned from their kite-building, there are three basic axes in flight: roll, yaw and pitch. Roll is when an aircraft tilts or banks to one side or the other; yaw is when the tail swings from side to side like oversteer in a car; and pitch is its nose-up or nose-down attitude: climbing or diving. To steer their ‘Flyer’ by using yaw, the Wrights employed the same vertical rudder that they and others had used for their gliders, although they mounted this at the front, canard-style, rather than at the back. To achieve both pitch and roll they devised a system of wing warping, or bending the entire wing. This device was still used extensively on early aircraft like the Morane-Saulnier GB type in which Marty and Strange stalled and crashed at Hendon in 1914, although by then the method was obsolescent: a process that the Wrights themselves had unintentionally hastened.
    For, in the wake of their epoch-making success of late 1903, the brothers made an error of judgement that was to costAmerica the lead in aviation and cede it to Europe. This was to take out a patent on their aircraft’s control system and then to become litigious. It was not only their own wing-warping they patented but any form of flight control that involved interfering with the airflow over the outer portions of a wing. Their lawyer was quick to bring legal actions against aspiring rivals in the United States and even against visiting aviators from Europe who experimented with any form of wing-bending to control their own aircraft. This was vociferously condemned as selfishly hindering progress, especially in Europe, where no pioneer was about to quit his own researches out of respect for an American patent. This attempt to monopolise the science of controlling an aircraft backfired even in the United States itself where another great figure of early aviation, Glenn Curtiss, was harried by the Wrights’ lawyer. The mantle of leadership effectively passed across the Atlantic to men like France’s Voisin brothers (who had opened their first aircraft factory as early as 1904), the Farman brothers, Armand Deperdussin and Louis Blériot. Other European pioneers included the young Dutchman Anthony Fokker and in Britain the American Samuel Cody, the Irishman J. W. Dunne, A. V. Roe, Geoffrey de Havilland and Claude Grahame-White. In the United States it was a measure of Glenn Curtiss’s brilliance and determination that despite the Wrights’ opposition he still managed to produce original and sound early aircraft as well as founding one of the great American aircraft companies. Generally speaking, however, after its pioneering start in aviation the United States rested on its laurels to such an extent that when it finally went to war on the Entente (Allied) side in 1917 American pilots were obliged to fight in French and British combat