Author: Charles River Editors
Narrator: David Bernard
Unabridged: 1 hr 31 min
Format: Digital Audiobook
Publisher: Findaway Voices
Published: 08/13/2019
The Wright Brothers initially underestimated the difficulties involved in flying, and they were apparently surprised by the fact that so many others were working on solving the “problem of human flight” already. Decades before their own historic plane would end up in the National Air & Space Museum, Wilbur and Orville asked the Smithsonian for reading materials and brushed up on everything from the works of their contemporaries to Leonardo Da Vinci. Undeterred by the work, and the fact that several would-be pioneers died in crashes trying to control gliders, the Wright Brothers tested out gliding at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina for several years, working to perfect pilot control before trying powered flight.
A decade later, aircraft appeared in the skies over the battlefields of World War I, but they did not represent a complete novelty in warfare either, at least not during the early months of World War I. While airplanes had never before appeared above the field of war, other aerial vehicles had already been in use for decades, and balloons had carried soldiers above the landscape for centuries to provide a high observation point superior to most geological features. The French used a balloon for this purpose at the Battle of Fleurus in 1794, and by the American Civil War, military hydrogen balloons saw frequent use, filled from wagons generating hydrogen from iron filings and sulfuric acid. The balloonist Thaddeus Lowe persuaded President Abraham Lincoln to use the airships for observation, communicating troop movements to the ground with a telegraph wire.
Indeed, with advances in dirigible technology, many military thinkers and even aeronautical enthusiasts believed that blimps would remain the chief military aerial asset more or less forever. These men thought airplanes would play a secondary role at best, and that they might even prove a uselessly expensive gimmick soon to fade back into obscurity.
For decades the Cheyennes endured abuses from the white settlers without spilling a single drop of white blood in well-merited reprisal. Finally goaded beyond human endurance, they turned on their tormentors with pent-up ferocity.They fought with de...
The world is filled with mysteries, and even in the modern age, much of the planet remains unexplored. The depths of the oceans and the intricate and extensive cave systems that honeycomb some parts of the Earth are still largely unknown. Thus, it s...
Charles Darwin is arguably the most influential scientist of all time. His Origin of Species forever changed our concept of the world’s creation. Darwin’s revolutionary career is the perfect vehicle for historian Paul Johnson. Marked by ...
Recorded over the course of the last two decades, many of these personal stories of Titanic survivors would be lost to time had these recordings not been made. These deeply personal accounts recreate with unparalleled immediacy and poignancy man at ...
Lincoln's Last Hours describe the assassination and last moments of President Lincoln's life. They were written by Dr. Charles Leale, the first doctor to attend to Lincoln after he was shot.
Charles Dickens is often remembered because of his Christmas Carol. And even though that is a very interesting novel, it wasn’t even his favorite. Some artists and authors claim that a work of art or a novel should be completely separated from...
The Lost Titanic Tapes tell the story of what happened in the words of those who lived it. It is a collection of first-person exclusive accounts from the survivors of the legendary disaster who would never forget the events of those brief hours, the...
This is Volume 2 of the Hidden History Of Texas. This book details about how Anglo immigration affected Spanish and Mexican Texas. It also discusses several early Texas Settlements, including the towns of Nacogdoches, San Augustine, San Antonio, and...
Given the abundance of funerary artifacts that have been found within the sands of Egypt, it sometimes seems as though the Ancient Egyptians were more concerned with the matters of the afterlife than they were with matters of the life they experien...