Wright brothers

The Wright brothers, Wilbur (1867–1912) and Orville (1871–1948), were American inventors from Dayton, Ohio, who built and flew the first successful powered aeroplane. On 17 December 1903, near Kitty Hawk in North Carolina, their Wright Flyer made the first controlled, sustained flight by an engine-powered, heavier-than-air machine. Their key insight was that a pilot must be able to steer and balance an aircraft in the air, and the three-axis control system they devised remains the basis of aircraft controls today.

Wilbur was born in 1867 near Millville, Indiana, and Orville in 1871 in Dayton, two of the seven children of Milton Wright, a bishop of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, and Susan Koerner. They later traced their interest in flight to a toy helicopter their father gave them in 1878. Neither ever married.

In 1889 Orville started a printing business, which Wilbur joined, and in 1892 they opened a bicycle shop, later making their own bicycles. Bicycles taught them that an unstable machine can be balanced by a skilled rider, a lesson that shaped their approach to flight. The death of the German glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal in 1896 turned their curiosity into serious research.

Unlike rivals focused on engines, the Wrights treated control as the unsolved problem. Watching birds, Wilbur concluded that they twisted their wingtips to roll, and the brothers developed wing-warping to do the same. From 1900 they tested gliders on the windy sand dunes of Kitty Hawk. When the 1901 glider disappointed, they built a small wind tunnel and gathered more accurate wing data than anyone before them. Their 1902 glider combined wing-warping for roll, a front elevator for pitch and a movable rear rudder for yaw, and in March 1903 they applied for a patent on this control system.

For power they needed a light engine, which their mechanic Charlie Taylor built in six weeks. On 17 December 1903 Orville made the first flight, covering 120 feet in 12 seconds; the fourth and longest, by Wilbur, covered 852 feet in 59 seconds. The press largely ignored it. In 1904 and 1905 they continued at Huffman Prairie near Dayton, where Wilbur flew the first complete circle and, in October 1905, a flight of 24.5 miles in 38 minutes in the Flyer III, the first practical aeroplane.

Fearing copying, the brothers then refused to fly in public without a contract, and in France especially, many dismissed them as bluffers. That changed in August 1908, when Wilbur flew at Le Mans and stunned French aviators with his controlled turns. At Fort Myer, Virginia, Orville gave the United States Army a demonstration flight, but in September 1908 a propeller broke and the crash killed his passenger, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, the first aeroplane fatality. Wilbur trained pilots in France and in Rome, and in October 1909 flew past an estimated million spectators in New York.

After founding the Wright Company in 1909, the brothers fought long lawsuits, chiefly against Glenn Curtiss, over their control patent. The cases damaged their public image and distracted them from new designs, and when the United States entered World War I in 1917 its forces relied on French aircraft. Worn down by travel and litigation, Wilbur died of typhoid fever in Dayton on 30 May 1912, aged 45.

Orville sold the company in 1915, made his last flight as a pilot in 1918 and served for 28 years on the government's aeronautics advisory committee. A long dispute with the Smithsonian Institution, which promoted Samuel Langley's failed Aerodrome as the first machine capable of flight, led him to send the original Flyer to the Science Museum in London in 1928. Orville died on 30 January 1948, and the Flyer went on display at the Smithsonian that December. Rival claims to the first flight exist, but the Wrights' repeated, controlled flights are widely credited as the invention of the aeroplane.

Our 1900 and 1914 maps show the United States in the years when the brothers turned the dream of flight into a working machine.