A Starting Device

In Dayton’s light winds, the Wright brothers needed as much as 240 feet of wooden rails to take off by engine power alone, and when the breeze shifted the track had to be moved and pegged down again to face the new wind direction. After they built a catapult in September 1904, they could launch their flyer with only 60 feet of rail. As Wilbur Wright wrote on August 8, 1904, they needed a starting device that would render them independent of wind and were designing one. For catapult-assisted takeoffs, a team of horses pulled a 1600-pound counterweight to the top of a wooden derrick, and when the weight fell sixteen feet, it added enough speed to get a flying machine airborne regardless of wind direction and strength.

Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio · United States