In the Why Things Fly post, we explored the four forces that keep every airplane in the sky. But there’s a detail we glossed over. What determines whether a plane can fly fast or slow, land on short runways or need miles of pavement, and stall gently or drop like a rock? That detail is the airfoil: the specific cross-sectional…
On the morning of December 17, 1903, a man named John T. Daniels crouched behind a camera on a cold, windy beach in North Carolina. He had never taken a photograph in his life. Wilbur Wright handed him a rubber bulb and told him to squeeze it if anything interesting happens. Something interesting happened. Daniels squeezed. And the resulting image,…