ShmoopTube

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Shmoop! The Wright brothers first flight was pretty awesome. Come on, they were flying. No

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[bird and plane flying in the sky]one had done that before, but they only went about 120 feet. It's a big leap to

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go from a quick pop like that to soaring across the Atlantic at 600 miles an hour,

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while watching all the movies we recently missed. The Wrights were part of

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the pioneer era of building flying machines it went from about 1900, to the

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first world war and it involved lots of dudes all over the world experimenting

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[man crashing plane] with crazy flying contraptions. Well some of those machines were total death traps

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but at least they weren't like that plane from Snakes on a Plane, talk about a death trap.

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Well there were some big firsts and cool stunts during the pioneer era. The first

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nonstop flight across the Atlantic happened in 1919, and the first flight

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around the world, the whole world definitely not a nonstop, happened in 1924. It wasn't

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until the first world war that planes got serious.[planes on fire, plane warfare]

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The war was awful but they desire to one-up the other guys Air Force helped humanity

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make huge technological leaps. Good things coming out of a war? Yah our heads

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hurts. Anyway here are some of the changes we're talking about. For one the

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Biplane model was out and the Monoplane was in. You know how really cool planes

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had that strange four wing design. Well with one pair of wings on top of

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each other and the wooden struts in between, yah that one. Well planes with just

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[two men standing by plane] one stronger set of wings turned out to work way better. We'll take the single

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wing design for our next cross trip on the Atlantic any day. Another big step

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forward was ditching wood for aluminum. Yep, the earliest planes were made of

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wood, heavy canvas and maybe duct tape. By the 1920s planes were made of aluminium

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and other lightweight metals and they got considerably less terrifying as a [plane flying off of cliff successfully]

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result. Engines also got bigger and better. Yeah we've been through this

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before. But the internal combustion engine got way bigger and more powerful

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over the 20th century, that made planes faster and able to carry more weight.[elephant entering plane]

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By 1929 planes were getting serious. The Dornier Do-X was just about the coolest

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thing anybody had ever built. It was a German built airliner and it was the

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biggest, heaviest, flying machine the world had ever seen.

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Just when people were starting to think planes had done all they can do for

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the world. Well some folks invented the jet engine and of course those folks

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were who? Yep Nazis so uh thanks we guess. Don't expect a thank-you card literally, [two men in front of jet plane]

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you guys are still literally the worst, literally. Towards the end of World War

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two German engineers were doing some serious tinkering and by 1943 they had

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the first jet-powered bomber plane. Well the jet engine was all over the

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world by the end of World War two, eventually making flights, cheaper, faster,

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and way more profitable. So again warfare spurred innovation. Geez,

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why can't we innovate for free ice cream or something. [mad Nazi man in Library]

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I think the Nazis would have gone for that.

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