<text id=00he0200><title>The Signal Corps buys the Airplane: Introduction</title>
<history>US Air Force: Events History</history>
<article><hdr>The Signal Corps buys the Airplane: Introduction</hdr><body>
<p>The Wright brothers made the first controlled, powered flights in history on 17 December 1903. As late as three years after the fact, scientific journals still pointed out the total impossibility of man-carrying, powered flight. By then, the Wrights had been flying in public view from Huffman's pasture outside Dayton, Ohio.
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<p>The British government approached the Wrights at the end of 1904 with an offer to buy their airplane, but was politely refused. The patriotic brothers wanted their own government to benefit, and tried three times in 1905 to interest the War Department. The last of the three replies they received, from the Recorder of the Board of Ordnance and Fortification, the responsible agency for funding new weapons of war, was a classic: "... the Board does not care to formulate any requirements for the performance of a flying machine or to take any further action until a machine is produced which by actual operation is shown to be able to produce horizontal flight and to carry an operator."
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<p>By then, the Wrights had made more than 150 flights, many of them in full view of reporters and spectators.
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<p>They continued to experiment, undaunted, and during 1906 designed and built a much better engine than their original powerplant of 1903. In 1907, the Aero Club of America took action, going directly to President Theodore Roosevelt and politely demanding some action to acquire the Wright invention for development as a weapon. Official channels led the Wrights back to the Board of Ordnance and Fortification with outline specifications for their latest airplane proposal. They emphasized that they did not want advance payments, and that they were not asking for financial support until a successful article was delivered. The Board responded that funds were not available, and that any action would require an act of Congress.
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<p>Wilbur Wright went to Washington to tell the Chief of Ordnance and the Board's Secretary what he and his brother had done. He was invited to appear before the Board on 5 December 1907, and was at last able to convince the Board that he was a serious, believable co-inventor of an operational flying machine.
