 The United States Army presents the Big Picture, an official report produced for the armed forces and the American people. Now to show you part of the Big Picture, here is Sergeant Stuart Queen. Modern Army aviation is today a highly specialized field. The pilots who fly the Army aircraft have been carefully trained in many skills over and above piloting. The aircraft have each been designed to do a particular job and to do it well. For no one type of aircraft can be universal in its application. Some of these aircraft carry airborne troops, as for example, the caribou. Some are designed for fast low-level observation and reconnaissance missions, but they all have a common denominator in that they all come from a common source. The picture you will see today is part one of a three-part series. This portion takes us back to the very beginning of aviation at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Part two, which you will see next week, takes this story on from General Billy Mitchell era up to the present. Part three will show you how the United States Army has utilized all of the progress in the aviation field to create highly specialized aircraft in order to perform its global mission. And now, part one of the history of aviation. On December 17, 1993, Orville and Wilbur Wright made man's first four control flights in a powered airplane. That day they lifted the world into a new dimension. What the Wrights had achieved at Kitty Hawk barely evoked passing attention in a nation whose people were absorbed with the problems of a dynamic new age. There were other less celestial wonders closer at hand. The automobile, the telephone, the motion picture. But at number seven Hawthorne Street, December 17, 1993 was a momentous day. The young girl who was then the Wright's housekeeper, Kerry Grumbach remembers, I remember the telegram while it come, that they had flown. The telegram from Kitty Hawk had a special significance for the mechanic who worked in the Wright's bicycle shop, Charlie Taylor. I made all the different parts in the motor, even made the clankshaft. I made it out of a solid block of steel, about 32 inches long, six inches wide and inch and five-eighths thick. The motor itself, from the time I started, well, I had it ready for test, was six weeks. Fifty years ago I can remember, it was, it was yesterday almost. There was not a complete indifference to the Wright's discovery. A small group of Americans were laboring to further the art. And in Europe, where the airplane's military potential was quickly realized, a fresh wave of enthusiasm for aviation followed the Wright's success. In France, Larry O, Farman and Brickay were flying airplanes of their own design. The Englishman Curry and the Brazilian Santos Dumont, most of whose experiments took place in France, also captured the imagination of Europe with successful flights. The Wright's had offered to demonstrate their airplane to the United States Army shortly after their first successful flights. The Army declined, preferring to develop its small fleet of balloons as an air arm. Oddly, it was a young balloonist lieutenant of the Army who finally was instrumental in obtaining a chance for the Wright's and their airplane, Frank P. Long. After four long years of failing to recognize the Wright's, finally in December of 1907, the Board of Ordnance and Fortification granted the interview to Wilbur. At once he inspired the conference. This led to a contract in February of 1908 between the Wright brothers and the signal corps in which they agreed to purchase an airplane that would fly 40 miles an hour, carry two persons, remain in the air for one hour, and, strangely, it was to have some kind of a device by which, in case the motor stopped, it could be landed without crashing. In the summer of 1908, Orville Wright bought to Fort Meier, Virginia, the airplane that was to build their specifications of the contract. Day after day, we watched him fly around and around the field in his tuning up flights, and finally on the 9th of September, he broke the world record by staying in the air for over one hour. Another young Army lieutenant, Benjamin Folloy, had a chance to fly in the Wright plane at Fort Meier. Finally following the endurance test with Orville Wright and Lieutenant Lomb, Orville, with a quiet little grin on his face, invited me to be his guest on the crucial and final cross-country and speed test. On July 30th, we took off on the final cross-country and speed test. Shortly after we straightened out on the course for Alexandria, Orville, with this same little grin on his face, told me that if he had to land anywhere on the route, and he'd pick out the thickest tumble trees he could find and land on top of them. Fortunately, the little engines that we had at the time carried us all the way through without any difficulty. And we finally landed back at Fort Meier drill ground with three world records, cross-country, ten miles, altitude, 600 feet, and speed 42.5 miles an hour. The United States Army had an airplane. The need now was for pilots. There in the fall of 1999, under Orville Wright's instructions, a Lieutenant F. E. Humphries, of U.S. engineers and myself, were taught to fly, and at the end of some three hours, were soloed and told we were pilots. So in 1999, the military airplane was mated to the military pilot. Meanwhile, all over the world, aviation pioneers encouraged by the Wright Brothers flights were hard at work. The principles of flight were now widely known, and designers were applying them to many types of aircraft. Glenn Curtis, Glenn Martin, and the Canadian J. A. D. McCurdy were designing and flying airplanes in competition and for exhibition. In Europe, the airplanes of Blaireo, Paulum, Parman, and Dehaveland were demonstrating obvious advances in both speed and range. And in Russia, Igor Sikorsky was taking his first steps into the age of flight. I remember very, very well the early, interesting period in France in 1999 and 1910 when the very first attempts were made to push aviation from the purely original experimental flying to some kind of successful practical achievement. I have seen Blaireo coming in the same factory to purchase his motor on which a few months later he crossed the English Channel. At that time, I had my share of failures with the first helicopter, which was a fine machine, only it couldn't fly. Glenn Martin remembers an episode of his pioneering days. I've just been reading an old postcard sent by our family doctor to my mother. Dated September 30, 1910. This is at a time when I just began to leave the ground in a flying machine. And it says, for heaven's sake, if you have any influence with that wild-eyed, hallucinated young man, call him off before he is killed. He'll devote his energies to substantial, feasible, and profitable pursuits, leaving dreaming to the professional dreamers. For a dreamer, Glenn Martin was attracting a remarkable group of clear-thinking young designers as workmen. The first to join him was Donald Douglas. My first memory of things in aviation was seeing the first right airplane demonstrated for the signal car in 1908 at Fort Myers outside of Washington. So I took the street car and one thing or another and got out to Fort Myers. Well, there she was as I had seen her picture, the old right pusher. And there were Wilbur and Orville. And there was that old launching device that kind of looked like a guillotine and they had the airplane perched up at the starting part of the track and the way it's all ready to go. And then as I recall it was Wilbur that got into the machine, but I guess it was Colonel Lam, they pulled the old latch. And off she went. One of the first pilots was Roy Nobenshoe, who was a balloonist even before he became an airplane pilot. This gentleman I'm pointing out right back of the pilot was Walter Brookings. Walter was a great pilot. His judgment was uncanny, but he was very temperamental. As a matter of fact, he and Arch Hoxie and Ralph Johnson was the three best pilots that the right company had. And each one tried to outdo the other. The ambitions of some designers went far beyond their skills. As Igor Sikorsky has said, In the history of aviation there have been many contraptions which to the good fortune of their inventors failed to fly. And Sparay, whose contributions to the aircraft instrument field were momentous, puts a pre-war aircraft through its paces. All this ferment, however often it seemed to lack direction, was contributing in one way or another to the growth of aviation. The airplane was growing cleaner in design. Its horsepower was more dependable. The disparaging term aeronaut was giving way to aviator, a term of respect. And aviation was emerging as a science. A pioneer aeronautical engineer and educator, Dr. Jerome Hunsaker. Professional education in aeronautical engineering began in this country at MIT in the winter of 1913-14. This course was started by President McLaurin, borrowing me from the Navy Department and supplying me with one assistant as staff who was a recent graduate in mechanical engineering, Donald Douglas, from whom Moore was to be heard. The pusher engine of early planes had been replaced by the tractor engine installations which allowed higher speeds. The rights were foreseeing these helpful aircraft devices. And other inventors such as Elmer Sparay were inventing and refining them. Here, a courtesy plane flies with the early Sparay automatic pilot. Almost without exception in the first decade of the airplane, the designers were pilots. They built, tested, and flew their own designs. Wrights, Lario, Santos Dumont, Curtis, Rose, Sikorsky to Haveland, and Martin. At Glenn Martin's, a band of engineers and craftsmen had gathered together whose names and time would be synonymous with aircraft designs of world rank. Donald Douglas, James H. Dutch Kindleburner, Lawrence Villarebel, Alan Lockheed, John Northram. The United States was the cradle of flight. Inventors of a high order had appeared. Our pilots were unmatched. First-rate designers emerged. Brilliant men specialized in the components of the airplane. But as a pioneer who specialized in aircraft horsepower, Frederick B. Rentschler summarizes. Prior to World War I, our most important contribution to aviation was the flight of the Wright Brothers. From December 1909 to March 1911, 13 months, the entire United States Air Force consisted of one officer myself. Once we were in mechanic, eight of us had men in one airplane. The government at that time wasn't very keen about turning money loose for flying. I had the great appropriation of $150 allotted to me to take care of the airplane for the entire year in 1910. Two air-minded young lieutenants shortly joined General Folloy, the one-man Air Force. They were Hap Arnold and T. DeWitt Milling. Looking back 42 years ago to March 1911, the month in which General Arnold and myself were ordered to date and to learn to fly with the Wright Brothers, and to think of the plane that we used at that time and see the advance that has been made since, it seems incomprehensible that one man in his own lifetime could live through such progress. After our very brief period of instruction of about a week, two to three hours in order to learn to fly, we were sent to College Park, Maryland. We immediately started in to try to find some method by which we could develop from the standpoint of taking photographs, using the machine gun, dropping bombs. The air arm of the United States Navy began under equally apathetic circumstances. Naval Aviator Number 3 was Admiral John H. Towers. In the autumn of 1911, when I was quite a young naval officer serving aboard one of our battleships, I got the idea that I wanted to learn to fly, that naval aviation would amount to something for naval purposes. So I put in a request to the Navy Department, and they came back and quite frankly said that they didn't believe aviation would ever amount to anything. But if it turned out to be otherwise, they would consider my request. During that winter, Congress appropriated money for the Navy to buy three airplanes, so they were in it whether or not they wanted to be. And then they decided to select three officers to be taught to fly as part of the contract with the manufacturers of the airplanes. I was fortunate enough to be one of those three officers. The other two were Ellison and Rogers. I also became a very close friend of Glenn Curtis and was associated with him throughout his whole life. The man had an enormous amount of vision. He had already conducted in cooperation with the Navy tests of landing an airplane on a platform, on a cruiser, and also of taking off. But he had in his mind then the idea which later developed into the powerful carriers that we have today. The airplane now had official recognition, both from the Army and the Navy. But it was a cautious acceptance. The time forged armaments still held sway. When the fledgling Army fliers experimented with a primitive bombsite and a Lewis machine gun, installed an aircraft at College Park, Maryland, they landed and foresaw whole battles that someday might be fought in the air. The War Department promptly pierced that bubble. An official spokesman pointed out with finality that the Army had airplanes for just one purpose, reconnaissance. From a pistol shot at Sarajevo, the first of the great modern world wars exploded. And almost overnight all of Europe was engulfed in conflict. The airplane was put to work just as the U.S. War Department spokesman had prophesied, as observation and scouting cracked. The source of peril lay in the artillery, machine gun and rifle fire, scourging the entrenched troops from across the wasted land. But in the air, Allied and German pilots often waved to each other as they passed on their observation missions. Then, instead of the courteous wave, the opposing pilots began exchanging pistol fire. Presently the first crudely mounted machine guns appeared. Now the frantic race of inventing, improvising, adapting and refining aircraft equipment began. Quickly the Germans countered the hand-operated machine gun by installing upon their aircraft the invention of Tony Focker, a machine gun synchronized to fire through the aircraft propeller. A paramount lesson that the Allies were to remember a generation later was being learned in air warfare for the first time. No design capable of still further development could be frozen. While the single-engined airplane had been engrossing most designers, in Russia Igor Sikorsky, in nineteen-throats I decided that the time came to build a large machine with several motors. At that time I was certain already that the future aviation would be connected with fairly large aircraft. In thirteen I completed my first four-motor airplane in the grant. The ship proved a complete success. It flew quite well. The Grand's military successor, the Ilja Mormetz, was the first four-engine bomber in world history. It struck time after time at the central powers on the eastern front. The internal combustion engine now became an instrument of intensive technical development. The first successful engine had not been developed until 1860. One of the world's foremost engine designers, Leonard S. Hobbs, recollects its history. It starts out actually with a little-known Frenchman by the name of Lenoir, who has never gotten the credit he deserved. He built and actually marketed the first internal combustion engine. And it was from his engine that the Wright brothers were able to build one. Of course, the early pre-war power plants are fairly well known. The Anzanis and the Curtis O'Exis. The First World War did mark a great advance in power plants. First, there were the Rotaries, the Clerges, the Nome Roans. Then there was the Renault engine, which was a very good French engine. The British RAF engines toward the end of the war came the very beginning of what I think is the modern engine. First, there was the Hispanel, a Suiza, with its solid block. And a valve arrangement, which is standard in a lot of engines to this day. Also out of the First World War came the remarkable German effort, the BMW. Now this engine is the first engine that I know of in all history that attempted to overcome the effects of altitude on power. Into a conflict in which European antagonists had been tempered by three years of savage battle, whose equipment had been perfected by the necessity of survival without regard to cost, the United States now plunged. It was the world's 14th ranking air power, with only 28 airplanes, 65 pilots, supplemented by 50 flying students. Its Navy combat air arm was even smaller. Its industry lacked integration. The nation that had allotted Benifolloy $150 in 1910 for maintenance of that year's Air Force, promptly voted $600 million to fulfill a plea by the Allies to have 5,000 airplanes and 4,500 pilots on the western front by the spring of 1918. Our national mistake was the assumption that an instrument as dynamic as the airplane could be designed, tested, and developed overnight. Thousands of rookie pilots training in the United States and in England and France had an inspiring example of American air combat performance through the brilliant exploits of the Lafayette Escadrill, a team of American volunteers who had joined the Allied cause in 1916. But American performance had its hours of frustration. One of the first young pilots to see action in France with the first aero squadron was Oliver P. Eccles. We'd been equipped with a new type of French airplane with a new and very much improved engine. These airplanes were assigned to us. The squadron had the strength of 18 airplanes. And we were assigned the mission of supporting one of the American divisions one afternoon in the attack. The airplanes took off 18 strong. During the afternoon, all of the airplanes force landed from engine failure. Fortunately, none of them behind the enemy line. The pilots of World War I made the term dogfights synonymous with their work. America's top ace, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker of the famed 94th Haddon Ring Squadron, reflects on the different approaches to combat of the pilots of World War I and the pilots of today. That individualism was possible because the planes were much slower. We could stay and maneuver. Whereas today, it's impossible because of the tremendous speed, the difference of 100 miles an hour and 6 or 700 miles an hour. We had 150 horsepower. Today, if they haven't got 5 or 6,000 horsepower, it's no good. We had two little pop guns, 30 caliber, that would shoot sometimes 450 rounds a minute. Today, they've got six and eight 50 caliber guns that will shoot a thousand rounds a minute. A naval officer whose career has bridged two wars in aeronautics, Admiral DeWitt C. Ramsey. From the outset, the Navy's problem has been to bring aircraft into the mobile operating forces of the fleet. The real beginning of naval aviation, let us say, took place in England, where during World War I, a lot of part of it, the British converted two ships, the Furious and the Argus, and built into them the features which were desirable for aircraft launching and recovery. As a result, the Navy embarked on the initial program of converting the old Collier Jupiter into our first flat top, the Langley. In 1918, as the war began to move toward its climax, American aircraft equipment still had not entered combat. An intensive effort was being made to perfect the Liberty engine. Before the Liberty or any other aerial product of the United States' designing boards could be put in action, the final critical offensive of World War I had begun. Millions of men pulled out of trenches to attack or retreat. Above them, to be sure, planes flew in bombing and strafing missions. Individual pilots whose names became legendary met in dog fights. Germany's von Richthofen. France's von. Canada's Bishop. Germany's Gehring. And such American aces as Rickenbacker, Luke, Loveberry, Vaughn, Spring, Kindley, Landis, Swab, Hunter. After the war was over, a great many of American boys had been taught to fly, but they didn't get to the front. Of course, after the war was over, they had nothing to do. And there were a great many surplus airplanes. And that is the period when you hear so much about the days of Barton storming. After the war, with all these surplus airplanes, a lot of the fellows who had been taught to fly then decided to go out and carry passengers and do stunts and regular exhibition flying principally at the county fairs and state fairs and things of that sort. Both the Army and Navy Air Arms shortly were reduced once again to organizations hardly larger than the membership of the Civic Club. Yet in both services, the men who remained were uniquely zealous advocates of their calling. Army pilots already had inaugurated air mail service on May 15, 1918. A service that had been under discussion since 1910. William Boeing, who had entered aviation in 1916, was instrumental in starting the first international air mail service on the North American continent. In 1919, Eddie Hubbard and I took a flight up to Vancouver, BC. On our return trip, the postmaster at Vancouver handed us a mail sack for delivery to the postmaster at Seattle. This was the first international mail ever carried by plane into the United States. The big picture is an official report for the armed forces and the American people. Produced by the Army Pictorial Center. Presented by the Department of the Army in cooperation with this station.