Brief History Of Automobiles And Aviation During The 1900s

Towards the end of the 1800s into the 1900s, technology was revolutionized due to many inventions that were created/revised. Two of the most prominent inventions during this time-period that are important to the history of technology are: automobiles and aviation. Not only do these two inventions have an impact on the history of technology, but the history of automobiles and aviation both stand as excellent examples for current inventors to perceive the struggles of developing successful technology. Therefore, to understand the importance of the history of technology relating to automobiles and aviation, one must first have knowledge of the individuals who played an important role in the development of such inventions. Henry

With this in mind, the Model T during the 1900s was used as a method of transportation by many wealthy and middle-class customers due to being priced under $1,000. However, unlike the Model T that was an immediate hit, the production of trucks in America which were first produced in 1898, did not increase until the 1930s (Reich, pp. 19-24). The reason behind the importance of these ideas with the Model T and trucks pertain to why these automobiles became a success during their selected time periods. To clarify, as for the mass production of the Model T in 1913 through 1914, the Model T was already considered to be outdated due to other automobiles having improvements that the Model T lacked (Flink, p. 60). In fact, according to James J. Flink, he summarized that the production of the Model T was a success not because of the design or improvements made on the automobile, but because the value of the Model T gradually began to decrease around the 1920s as compared to other automobiles (p. 62). As for the production of trucks in the late 1800s into the early 1900s, trucks caught on much more slowly due to the lack of knowledge about trucks, and the overall time and investment it would take to convert from horses and wagons to trucks (Reich, p. 22). Fortunately, the production of trucks increased in the 1930s due to the benefits that

Two of the most credited inventors of aviation and the first successful flight in American history, are Wilbur and Orville Wright. However, before the Wright brothers earned their fame as the first successful inventors of a controlled flying-machine, there are several factors that led up to the Kitty Hawk flight on December 17, 1903 (Crouch, p. 16). In particular, before the Wright brothers gained interest in aviation in the late 1800s, both Wilbur and Orville Wright opened the Wright Cycle Company in 1892 in Dayton, Ohio, which later served the Wright brothers as a tool for recognizing that there was/is a link between stability and control for both bicycles and airplanes (Crouch, pp. 13-16). Then, shortly after, once the Wright brothers began to research aviation, Wilbur and Orville also noticed that to achieve flight one must have stability and control, diverse technologies within an airplane, and a variety of data collected from flight tests (Hallion, p. 25). Therefore, beginning in September 1900, the Wright brothers began their test flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to gather new information and improve their gliders over the span of the next three years (Hallion, pp. 28-30). Thus, after thousands of test flights that were conducted at Kitty Hawk before December 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright constructed the 1903 Flyer that on