manage a flying machine — pitch, roll, and yaw. Their control solution was “wing warping,” or bending the surface of each of their biplane’s wings to change its position in relation to oncoming wind. After extensive research and numerous glider tests, the Wrights successfully designed a 12-horsepower engine to produce the “lift” needed to drive their machine forward
1908 Henry Ford Produces Model T
America’s most admired man in the 1920s, according to some surveys, was Henry Ford. Born on a farm in Dearborn, Michigan in 1863, Ford as a boy much preferred working with machines than with animals. By age thirty he had built one of the first gasoline-powered motor vehicles in the United States. Ten years later he incorporated Ford Motor Company, declaring, “I will build a car for the great multitude.” In 1908, he did exactly that, producing the Model T automobile, of which more than 15 million were ultimately sold in America alone. Reasonably priced, simple to drive, and easy to maintain, the Model T ushered in the Automobile Age. Ford soon introduced the continuous conveyor belt, or assembly line, into his plants, vastly increasing production and reducing costs. While he opposed unions, Ford was a pioneer of “welfare capitalism” and paid workers substantially higher wages than his industrial rivals. By 1918, despite the existence of competitors such as Dodge and Oldsmobile, half the automobiles in America were Model Ts. SEE FIGURE 27 1911 China Becomes a Republic The Qing Dynasty, which ruled China from 1644 to 1912, was weakened in its later years by imperial corruption and repeated defeats in wars against European powers. Indeed, China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 demonstrated that Japan’s modernization process had been much more successful than China’s “Self-Strengthening Movement” of the late 19th century. Following European and American intervention to put down the anti- western Boxer Rebellion (1898–1899), the Qing Imperial Court undertook efforts at reform, but these were mostly half-hearted and de-stabilizing. This failure to liberalize and modernize prompted reformers to adopt revolutionary measures. The strongest of these revolutionary groups was led by Sun Yat-Sen, an anti-Qing activist who called for a nationalist uprising against foreign domination, a democratically elected government, and socialism to help common people. Protests organized by Sun and other revolutionaries ultimately spread throughout China, gaining support from regional military officers and leading to the Wuchang Uprising of October 1911, the beginning of China’s republican era. SEE FIGURE 28
and upward. SEE FIGURE 26
1905 Albert Einstein Publishes “Special Relativity” Theory
In 1905, Albert Einstein, a German physicist and Nobel prize winner, proposed the first part of what in 1916 became the general theory of relativity, a set of ideas that changed the world. The special relativity theory of 1905 modified concepts of space and time to reconcile them with experiments showing that light does not travel in a medium (or ether) and has a velocity independent of the motion of its source or observer. To make his new theory consistent with Newton’s Laws of Motion, Einstein hypothesized that the mass of an object increases as it approaches the speed of light. This led him to the conclusion that mass (m) and energy (E), previously considered unrelated concepts, are related according to the formula E=mc 2 . Einstein’s famous equation has since been confirmed by thousands of experiments. His special theory of relativity applied only to reference frames moving at constant speed and direction relative to one another. Einstein’s 1916 general theory extended the special theory to encompass accelerating reference frames, establishing a theory relating gravity to properties of space and time.
Figure 26. (top) A fragile and beautiful Wright Brothers biplane is shown here balanced on rails and ready for takeoff. Image courtesy of Library of Congress. Figure 27. (below) The Model T Ford put the nation on wheels and Americans never looked back. Image courtesy of Library of Congress. Figure 28. (above) Sun Yat-Sen, founder of the Chinese Republic. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.
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