F26-39 The Wright Brothers NEW
Class | Registration opens 8/16/2026 9:00 AM EDT
Wilbur and Orville Wright lived in Dayton, Ohio, at the beginning of the 20th century. Through hard work, brilliant insight and dangerous flight experiments, they invented the modern flying machine. These classes will describe the invention process from the early glider experiments, through the wind tunnel discoveries, the development of the lightweight motor and efficient propeller, the early powered flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and the final success at Huffman Prairie near Dayton in 1905. We will also discuss the patent battles and the efforts to sell airplanes to the U.S. and foreign governments prior to World War I.
Thomas Benson
 | Tom Benson is a Retired Senior Research Engineer from the NASA Glenn Research Center. He retired in 2015 after more than 35 years of service at NASA Glenn. For the first 20 years, he specialized in computer modeling of supersonic and hypersonic flows in propulsion systems. The last 15 years were mainly devoted to educational outreach.
Tom earned a Bachelor and Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from The Ohio State University in 1971. He then spent four years in the Air Force at Wright Patterson AFB doing high speed inlet testing and installed engine performance calculations for the F-5E, YF-16, YF-17, and B1-A. He returned to graduate school at OSU and passed the qualifiers for a PhD before coming to work at NASA in 1978. He is a board member of the Cleveland Astronomical Society, where he has given talks on the Apollo Moon Program, the International Space Station, and NASA Science Missions. |