History
Otto Lilienthal died while flying in 1896 as the result of a stall. Wilbur Wright encountered stalls for the first time in 1901, while flying his second glider. Awareness of Lilienthal's accident and Wilbur's experience, motivated the Wright Brothers to design their plane in "canard" configuration. This made recoveries from stalls easier and more gentle. The design saved the brothers' lives more than once.
The aircraft engineer Juan de la Cierva worked on his "Autogiro" project to develop a rotary wing aircraft which, he hoped, would be unable to stall and which therefore would be safer than aeroplanes. In developing the resulting "autogyro" aircraft, he solved many engineering problems which made the helicopter possible. Tragically, he was himself killed in the crash of an airliner, possibly due to a stall at take-off.
Read more about this topic: Stall (flight)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
“Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)