Podcasts about early years gallery

Stand in front of the Eugene Jacques Bullard exhibit in the Early Years Gallery. In August of 1917 Eugene Jacques Bullard, an American volunteer in the French army, became the first black military pilot in history and the only black pilot in World War I. After completing flight training, Bullard joined the 200 other Americans in the Lafayette Flying Corps, and he flew combat missions from Aug. 27 to Nov. 11, 1917. He distinguished himself in aerial combat, as he had on the ground, and was officially credited with shooting down one German aircraft. On Oct. 13, 1961, Eugene Bullard died and was buried with full military honors in his legionnaire’s uniform in the cemetery of the Federation of French War Veterans in Flushing, New York. On Sept. 14, 1994, the secretary of the Air Force posthumously appointed him a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force. The museum’s exhibit features several of Bullard’s medals and personal pins.

Let’s begin in the Early Years Gallery near the Wright Bicycle. In 1893, Dayton residents Wilbur and Orville Wright opened up the first of their several bicycle shops. Three years later they began building bicycles of their own design. Their successful bicycle business funded flight experiments, and it expanded their knowledge of building machines. The Wright brothers read everything on flying they could obtain, even though most of the material then available was based only on theory. The two brothers first worked with kites and gliders, and in the summer of 1903, they built a 40-foot, 4-inch span airplane that incorporated all their aerodynamic knowledge and incorporated the theories and ideas of German glider Otto Lilienthal. On December 17, 1903, Orville made the first successful powered, heavier-than-air flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. During 1904 and 1905, the Wrights continued researching the mysteries of flight at Huffman Prairie, which is now part of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

The National Museum of the United States Air Force began in 1923, not as a tourist attraction, but as an educational tool for Army engineers to study aeronautical engineering techniques from around the world. In the ensuing years, the museum also served as a place to study the application of air power, ballistic missiles and the contributions the Air Force made to the space race. Since 1996, the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC) has used the museum as a place to educate analysts and visitors on the evolution of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR). Anyone from Air Force intelligence organizations or from the Intelligence Community will find the museum an excellent place to study the role of intelligence in modern military history. The NASIC History Office created a tour of the museum that focused on the intelligence lessons the collection taught. The lessons learned in the study of intelligence history applied better to the complicated ISR mission of the 21st century when taught in such an environment. Today's intelligence analysts use the museum as a means of understanding the challenges faced by their predecessors and the technical innovation and dedicated analysis it required to overcome them. The NASIC tour follows the museum chronologically, beginning in the Early Years Gallery. The selected examples only represent a small fraction of the possible stories and the verbiage remains under constant scrutiny for accuracy and applicability. The tour script is a living document. Due to time restrictions with traveling through a massive museum, each lesson remains brief, although citations provided in the text enable further research into topics of interest. This first volume covers the years 1783 to 1945. I'm Rob Young, the NASIC historian.

Early Years Gallery

Early Years Gallery

Early Years Gallery

Early Years Gallery