Wright

In the spring of 1768, in his studio at 28 Queen Street in Derby, the thirty-three-year-old Joseph Wright completed the oil painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (oil on canvas, 183 × 244 cm). The painting shows a itinerant natural-philosopher demonstrating a vacuum experiment to a domestic audience of about seven adults and three children in the late-evening lamp-light of a provincial English house. The vacuum experiment in progress is the air-pump-with-a-glass-globe-and-a-cockatoo, in which the natural-philosopher slowly evacuates the air from the globe and the cockatoo in the globe begins to suffocate; the natural-philosopher can, by re-opening the tap, save the bird. The question of the painting is the moment of the experiment at which the natural-philosopher chooses whether to re-admit the air or to let the cockatoo die for the edification of the audience. The painting is, by every careful judgment of the Enlightenment-art-history (Ronald Paulson, David Solkin, Stephen Daniels), the foundational image of the eighteenth-century English-Enlightenment-encounter-with-experimental-science: the Wright canvas is, in plain reading, the British civilian-domestic version of what Wright had been seeing on his trips to Liverpool and Birmingham among the Lunar Society Enlightenment circle of Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, Matthew Boulton and Joseph Priestley. The painting was bought by Dr Benjamin Bates of Aylesbury in 1768 for £210; it was sold at auction in 1863, bought by the Tate Gallery in 1929, and is, since 1986, in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, where it has hung continuously.

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At ten thirty-five in the morning of Thursday the seventeenth of December 1903, on a flat strip of sand at the south end of Kill Devil Hills, a dune-and-grass settlement about four miles south of the fishing-village of Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the American bicycle-mechanics-and-aviation-pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright (Orville, thirty-two, the younger brother; Wilbur, thirty-six, the elder; both of Welsh-and-English ancestry on the paternal Wright line of the Wilbur-and-Orville great-great-grandfather Captain Daniel Wright the 1657 English-Puritan-emigrant to Massachusetts) made the first powered, controlled, sustained heavier-than-air flight in human history. The flight, in the Wright-Flyer-One (a twelve-horsepower-engine biplane of about six hundred pounds total weight, with a forty-foot wingspan and a pusher-propeller configuration), was made by Orville lying flat across the lower wing, hand on the pitch-control elevator, the engine running at full throttle on the launching-rail. The flight ran twelve seconds, covered about a hundred and twenty feet, reached an altitude of about ten feet, and landed safely in soft sand. Wilbur flew the fourth flight of the morning (the brothers had alternated flights all morning on the pre-arranged turn-and-turn-about) for fifty-nine seconds and eight hundred and fifty feet, the longest of the four December 17 flights. Powered controlled flight had been demonstrated.

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