History
For early attempts to fly, see Early flight.Sir George Cayley's gliders achieved brief wing-borne hops from around 1849. In the 1890s Otto Lilienthal built gliders using weight shift for control. In the early 1900s the Wright Brothers built gliders using movable surfaces for control. In 1903 they successfully added an engine.
After World War I gliders were built for sporting purposes in Germany and in the United States. Germany's strong links to gliding were to a large degree due to Post-WWI regulations forbidding the construction and flight of motorised planes in Germany, so the country's aircraft enthusiasts often turned to gliders and were actively encouraged by the German government.
The sporting use of gliders rapidly evolved in the 1930s and is now the main application. As their performance improved, gliders began to be used for cross-country flying and now regularly fly hundreds or even thousands of kilometers in a day if the weather is suitable.
Read more about this topic: Glider (sailplane)
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—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“The history is always the same the product is always different and the history interests more than the product. More, that is, more. Yes. But if the product was not different the history which is the same would not be more interesting.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)