Welcome to Erin Mankie's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm

and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display,

just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

As the old saying goes, history is written by the winners, and the history of aviation

was predominantly written by Orville and Wilbur Wright, who changed the world on December 17,

1903 with their first successful powered flight at Kitty Hawk.

And not just powered, but powered, controlled.

Between the record-setting event, the Wright brothers got to work building an entire industry

around the concept of putting man in the sky, and one way they did that was through the

use of patents.

For example, the Wrights were issued a patent in 1906 for their unique method of steering

and aircraft, called lateral control.

Lateral control was a way of maneuvering an airplane by tipping one wing down and raising

the opposite wing to turn the aircraft in a different direction.

The Wrights achieved this by using something called wing warping, by twisting the wing

a little.

They could get the plane to bank while also countering opposing wind gusts.

Hearing it described in words makes it sound like a technological marvel that nobody

had ever thought of before, but there really was no other way to get an aircraft to turn

...