Orville Wright Typed Letter Signed: Famed aviator writes about first flight For Sale


Orville Wright Typed Letter Signed: Famed aviator writes about first flight
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Orville Wright Typed Letter Signed: Famed aviator writes about first flight:
$9000.00

Historic TLS, two pages, 7.25 x 10.5, personal letterhead,May 16, 1940. Wright responds to fact-checking requests regarding his firstflight from John Walter Wood, author of Airports: Some Elements of Design andFuture Development.

In part: “First in regard to ‘Wright Field 1904–905’: Onpage 1, last line, the length of the 1901 wind tunnel is given as 8 feetinstead of 6 feet. I should have noticed this error in former drafts but failedto do so…The statement that Kill Devil Hill has moved about a quarter milesouth since the early years of our experiments there is not correct. The baseof the hill at that time was a little over 1200 feet from the spot on which theboulder now stands. I can not believe it is more than 1600 or 1700 feet fromthe boulder now. Maybe the reference to the hill moving had better beomitted…The weight of the bare motor was 152 pounds; with magneto it weighed170 pounds…It might be well to state that the motor was a horizontal one, sothat it be not confused with our later four cylinder vertical one.”

In fine condition, with two punch holes to top edge andfaint staple mark to the upper left corner. Accompanied by two carbon copies ofWood’s February 21 and February 27 letters to Wright.

Orville Wright first met John Walter Wood in 1935, and thetwo began a steady stream of correspondence regarding Wood’s writing projects.Wright, concerned with leaving behind accurate records for generations to come,happily complied with the author’s requests for information. In this letter, hecorrects facts about his airplane, the weight and orientation of the motor, andthe topography of Kill Devil Hills, the dunes just south of Kitty Hawk wherethe Wrights’ first historic flight began in 1903. The hill, difficult tomeasure due to shifting sands over the three decades since the first flight,holds a small rockfaced granite boulder placed by the National AeronauticAssociation to mark the lift-off site. Wright references the marker, saying, “Thebase of the hill at that time was a little over 1200 feet from the spot onwhich the boulder now stands. I can not believe it is more than 1600 or 1700feet from the boulder now.”

After years of work, with his facts checked by the pioneersof aviation, Wood’s book was published in 1940 and provided one of the firstthorough surveys of early flight. This is a wonderful glimpse into thecorrespondence between two passionate figures in aviation history, presentingfacts of the first flight straight from the aviator’s hand.



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