| eDreams Viajes |
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| European online travel agency that offers online reservations for tickets (air, rail, boat, bus, etc.), hotels, holiday packages, car and flat rentals and all tourist services using an integrated interface. Specific destinations: Asia. Australia, Oceanía And The Pacific. This operator claims to have more than 15.000 satisfied customers with no complaints whatsoever, and offers its website in various languages (English, French, Italian and Spanish), as well as a secure server. Today it is commonplace to make a seat reservation with any airline, but a hundred years ago things looked very different, and buying a ticket on an aircraft would indeed take you on first class, but to a mad house. The Wright brothers were indeed the first to fly a propelled and controlled aircraft; the Lilienthal brothers, a few years earlier, managed to fly a primitive glider for the first time in record, although it did not have an engine, and was not controllable. In the meantime, a number of people tried also to fly: Hiram Maxim was by then a millionaire who invented a machine gun that bears his name and has the dubious record of being so far the most effective killing machine invented by humankind; the machete takes the second place, and the atomic bomb, the third. Mr. Maxim was told by someone that in order to become rich, he had to invent something that would enable Europeans to kill each other at ease, and so he did and earned a fortune. He then got interested in the flying thing business and managed to pay with his deep pockets a steam powered machine that lifted from the ground but actually never flew, properly speaking, and abandoned the idea. However, he was the first person to attempt to put an engine into an aircraft. More or less at the same time that the Wright brothers began working on their designs, Samuel Pierpoint Langley, a famous astronomer and one of the directors of the Smithsonian Institute, with pockets of a good size to finance new projects, began adapting some of his designs for human flight. In 1896 he built a small aircraft that sported a steam engine: it was an 'Aerodrome' (This was the name he gave to his aircraft; later on, the word changed its meaning) launched by a catapult installed over a floating house located on the Potomac River, near Washington D.C. The small, unmanned aerodromes could fly, but when he tried to put a man o n a bigger scale version of those, things proved much harder. There were two manned tests of his aerodromes, both performed by engineer Chalres Manly as pilot, and both failed due to structural weaknesses in the aircraft that could not be solved at the time, before they ran out of money. A few days after the second ill-fated launch of the aerodrome, the Wright brothers made their historical first powered flight. Some years after, Manly and others like Glen Curtiss, trying to obtain a judicial verdict to destroy the Wright's patents attempted to fly the aerodrome from a lake using floaters, and they did so, at leas partially. The idea was - at least in Curtiss' mind - to demonstrate that Orville and Wilbur Wright had not invented the airplane and thus declare their patents void. However, while the aerodrome did manage to fly modestly, it was demonstrated easily that for those tests Langley's original design had been conveniently and considerably modified; so it flew for nothing. The Wrights were not immediately accredited with their success the Smithsonian Institute only recognized their privilege as the first powered flyers in 1942. However, by 1905, when it was clear that humans could fly at last, Langley's experiments amounted to a total cost of nearly 100.000 taxpayer's dollars of that time, while the Wrights had used up just 1.000 from their own pockets. |
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