Wright brothers

• 1. Introduction

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  The Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville, filed a U.S. patent in March 1903, months before they had flown a powered aircraft. The document did not claim to have invented a flying machine at all. Instead it claimed something narrower: a system for controlling one. Wilbur Wright was born near Millville, Indiana, in 1867, and died of typhoid fever in 1912. Orville Wright was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1871, and lived until 1948. Neither brother ever married. Between those two lives sits a story that runs through a Dayton bicycle shop and a beach in North Carolina. It runs through French racetracks packed with kings and a courtroom battle that nearly cost them everything they built. How did two men without a single high school diploma between them beat teams backed by government money and famous institutions? Why did the press in their own hometown refuse to believe what they had done, even years afterward? And once the world finally believed them, why did proving they owned the idea end up costing them so much?

• 2. The Flying Problem

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  The Wrights called it simply "the flying problem," and they believed the hardest piece of it was control, not power. Rivals such as Ader, Maxim, and Langley built powerful engines first. They bolted those engines to airframes fitted with untested controls and hoped to fly on the first attempt. Wilbur and Orville worked backward from that approach. They treated wings and engines as problems other experimenters had nearly solved. Control, they believed, was the piece nobody had solved at all.

  Otto Lilienthal, the German glider pioneer whose dramatic glides the brothers had read about years earlier, tried to balance his craft by shifting his own body weight in flight. The Wrights admired his willingness to practice, but judged his method of control inadequate for a heavier, more capable machine. Watching birds, Wilbur concluded that they rolled their bodies left or right by twisting the angle at the tips of their wings. The brothers reasoned a flying machine could bank into a turn the same way a bird does. It was also the same motion a cyclist uses leaning into a curve, and running a bicycle business had made that motion familiar to them.

  The actual breakthrough came almost by accident. Wilbur idly twisted a long, empty inner-tube box at the bicycle shop and noticed its two ends twist in opposite directions. That twisting motion became wing-warping, flexing the outer wing panels to different angles so one side gained lift while the other lost it. Langley and Chanute, by contrast, chased what they called "inherent stability," assuming a pilot could never react fast enough to correct a gust by hand. The Wrights wanted the opposite: a pilot with absolute control, even at the cost of building an aircraft that was not stable on its own. Their 1903 Flyer used drooping, anhedral wings that were unstable by design, a tradeoff they accepted because such wings resisted being flipped by a gusty crosswind.

  That philosophy sent the brothers looking for harder numbers than any aviator before them had bothered to collect.

• 3. Family And Formation

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  Wilbur and Orville were two of seven children born to Milton Wright, a clergyman, and Susan Catherine Koerner. Milton's mother, Catherine Reeder, descended from the same family line as the Vanderbilts, one of America's richest families. She was also descended from the Huguenot Gano family of New Rochelle, New York. The other Wright children were Reuchlin, Lorin, Katharine, and twins Otis and Ida, who died in infancy. None of the Wright children had a middle name, so their father worked hard to choose distinctive first names instead. He named Wilbur for the clergyman Willbur Fisk and Orville for the clergyman Orville Dewey, both men Milton admired. Friends in Dayton called them "Will" and "Orv." Neighbors called the family simply "the bishop's kids," a nod to Milton's role as a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ.

  Milton's church duties kept the family moving constantly, twelve times in all, before they returned to Dayton for good in 1884. In elementary school, Orville was mischievous enough that he was once expelled. In 1878, while the family was living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Milton brought home a toy helicopter for his two younger sons. The toy was based on an invention by the French aeronautical pioneer Alphonse Penaud. It was made of paper, bamboo, and cork, with a rubber band that twirled its rotor, and measured only about a foot long. Wilbur and Orville played with it until it broke, then built their own copy. In later years, both brothers pointed back to that toy as the spark that first drew them toward flying.

  A family move in 1884, from Richmond, Indiana, to Dayton, kept Wilbur from completing his diploma. He had already finished all four years of high school. Dayton finally awarded him that diploma posthumously on the 16th of April 1994, which would have been his 127th birthday. In late 1885 or early 1886, Wilbur was struck in the face with a hockey stick while playing an ice-skating game. The boy who hit him, Oliver Crook Haugh, later became a serial killer. Wilbur lost his front teeth in the accident. He had been vigorous and athletic before the injury, and though the wound itself was not severe, he withdrew from the world afterward. Wilbur had planned to attend Yale; instead he spent the next several years largely confined to the house. During that time he nursed his mother, who was dying of tuberculosis, and read widely in his father's library. He also helped Milton through a period of controversy inside the Brethren Church, while confessing unease about his own lack of ambition.

  Orville dropped out of high school after his junior year, in 1889, to start a printing business. He had designed and built his own printing press, with Wilbur's help. Wilbur soon joined the shop, and that March the brothers launched a weekly paper, the West Side News, listing Orville as publisher and Wilbur as editor. In April 1890 they converted it into a daily, The Evening Item, but it survived only four months before folding. They then settled into commercial printing work. One of their regular clients was Orville's friend and classmate Paul Laurence Dunbar, who went on to international acclaim as a groundbreaking African-American poet and writer. For a brief period the Wrights even printed the Dayton Tattler, a weekly newspaper Dunbar edited himself.

  In December 1892, riding the national bicycle craze, the brothers opened a repair and sales shop called the Wright Cycle Exchange, later renamed the Wright Cycle Company. By 1896 they were manufacturing their own brand of bicycle, and the business gave them the money to fund their growing curiosity about flight. That bicycle shop would later employ a mechanic named Charles Taylor, who ended up building something no bicycle customer had ever ordered: an airplane engine.

• 4. Chasing The Numbers

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  In May 1899, Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution asking for information and publications about aeronautics. Three events in 1896 had already pushed him toward that letter. In May of that year, Smithsonian Secretary Samuel Langley successfully flew an unmanned, steam-powered model aircraft. In August, Otto Lilienthal was killed when one of his gliders plunged to the ground. Wilbur later called Lilienthal's death the moment their serious interest in flight research began, writing, "Lilienthal was without question the greatest of the precursors, and the world owes to him a great debt." Drawing on the earlier work of Sir George Cayley, Octave Chanute, Lilienthal, Leonardo da Vinci, and Langley, the brothers began their own mechanical experiments that same year. Biographers note that Wilbur alone wrote of "my" machine and "my" plans in 1899 and 1900, before Orville joined fully and the language shifted to "we" and "our." Author James Tobin argued, "it is impossible to imagine Orville, bright as he was, supplying the driving force that started their work... Will did that. He was the leader, from the beginning to the end."

  The death of British aeronaut Percy Pilcher in another hang-gliding crash, in October 1899, only reinforced the brothers' focus on control above all else. In 1900 they traveled to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on Chanute's suggestion, after Wilbur also studied U.S. Weather Bureau data on the region's steady coastal winds. Kitty Hawk was remote, but closer to Dayton than the other sites Chanute had proposed, and it offered privacy from the reporters who had turned Chanute's own 1896 glider tests at Lake Michigan into something of a circus. For their gliders, the brothers adapted the Chanute-Herring biplane design, used lift data Lilienthal had published, and braced their wooden wing uprights with wires in a version of a bridge-building truss Chanute had used on his own glider. They mounted the horizontal elevator in front of the wings rather than behind, hoping to avoid the kind of nosedive that had killed Lilienthal, and left their first two gliders without a tail altogether.

  At Kitty Hawk in the autumn of 1900, most of the kite tests flew unpiloted, weighted with sandbags, chains, or a local boy. On the 20th of October, Wilbur alone made about a dozen free glides at the nearby Kill Devil Hills, dunes rising up to 100 feet. The craft's lift fell short of expectations, but its front elevator worked well and there were no accidents. Within those first few glides the brothers discovered, almost by chance, that a pilot could lie flat and headfirst on the lower wing without danger while landing, a position they used for the next five years. Returning in the summer of 1901 with a larger glider, they logged dozens of flights of 50 to 400 feet, yet the wing delivered only about a third of the calculated lift and sometimes turned the wrong way when Wilbur used wing-warping. On the train home, a dejected Wilbur told Orville that man would not fly for a thousand years.

  That failure pushed the brothers to question the "Smeaton coefficient," a figure for air pressure that had been used in lift calculations for more than a century. Using measurements from their 1901 flights, Wilbur calculated the true value at close to 0.0033, far below the traditional 0.0054. To test Lilienthal's own published data, they built an apparatus from a bicycle wheel mounted horizontally in front of the handlebars, balancing an airfoil against a flat plate as they pedaled. When the wheel turned instead of staying balanced, it confirmed something in the accepted numbers was wrong. Between October and December of 1901 they built a six-foot wind tunnel in their shop and tested dozens of miniature wings, using crude balances made from bicycle spokes and scrap metal. On the 18th of September 1901, before finishing those tests, Wilbur addressed the Western Society of Engineers in Chicago at Chanute's invitation, the first public account of the brothers' work; it was later published as a 300-copy pamphlet titled Some Aeronautical Experiments.

  In 1902 the Wrights ran basic wind tunnel tests on 200 scale-model wing shapes, then detailed tests on 38 of them, discovering that longer, narrower wings with a larger aspect ratio produced a far better lift-to-drag ratio. Biographer Fred Howard later called these tests "the most crucial and fruitful aeronautical experiments ever conducted in so short a time with so few materials and at so little expense." Writing in Century Magazine in 1908, the Wrights explained their reasoning bluntly: "The calculations on which all flying machines had been based were unreliable... We cast it all aside and decided to rely entirely upon our own investigations." The resulting 1902 glider grew to a wingspan of just over 32 feet, up from about 17 feet in 1900, and added a fixed rear rudder meant to fix turning problems. Instead, the glider began spiraling into the ground in crosswinds, a fault the brothers nicknamed "well digging." On the night of the 2nd of October 1902, Orville wrote in his diary, "I studied out a new vertical rudder." Making the rudder movable and linking it to the pilot's warping cradle let a single motion control both roll and yaw together, and on the 9th of October the brothers achieved true control through a turn for the first time, a milestone that completed their three-axis system of wing-warping, elevator, and rudder. Over the following weeks they logged more than a thousand flights, the longest lasting 26 seconds and covering over 600 feet.

  Peter Jakab of the Smithsonian later argued that perfecting this 1902 glider amounted to inventing the airplane itself, even before an engine was added at all.

• 5. Twelve Seconds At Kill Devil Hills

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  Charlie Taylor, the Wrights' shop mechanic, built the brothers a gasoline engine in just six weeks, working in close consultation with Wilbur and Orville after no outside manufacturer could meet their need for something light enough to fly. To save weight, the engine block was cast from aluminum, a rare practice at the time, and the design had no fuel pump, relying instead on gravity to feed gasoline from a tank on the wing strut. Believing an aeronautical propeller was essentially a wing rotating in a vertical plane, the brothers carved their own blades from laminated spruce, just over eight feet long, and mounted twin counter-rotating "pusher" propellers to cancel out torque. Wilbur's notebook from March 1903 recorded the prototype propeller as 66 percent efficient; modern tests on faithful reproductions have measured better than 75 percent efficiency under the conditions of the original flights, with a peak of 82 percent. The finished Wright Flyer cost less than a thousand dollars to build. By contrast, the U.S. government had given Samuel Langley more than $50,000 for his own man-carrying Great Aerodrome just a few years earlier, in 1898.

  At Kill Devil Hills, weeks of delay followed broken propeller shafts that twice sent the brothers back to Dayton for repairs. Because the 14th of December 1903 was the earliest workable day, Wilbur won a coin toss and made a three-second attempt that stalled on takeoff, causing minor damage. The brothers refused to fly on the 13th, a Sunday, even in good weather. Once repairs were finished, they finally flew on the 17th of December 1903, into a freezing headwind gusting to 27 miles per hour. Orville's first flight, at 10:35 in the morning, covered 120 feet in 12 seconds at a ground speed of only 6.8 miles per hour, and was captured in what became a famous photograph. Two more flights followed, of roughly 175 and 200 feet, before Wilbur took the controls for the fourth and final flight of the day. By his own account, Wilbur covered 852 feet in 59 seconds before pitching down into the sand, breaking the frame under the front rudder but leaving the rest of the machine sound. Five people witnessed the flights that day: Adam Etheridge, John T. Daniels, who snapped the famous photograph using Orville's pre-positioned camera, Will Dough, area businessman W. C. Brinkley, and a local teenager named Johnny Moore. Shortly afterward, a gust of wind flipped the grounded Flyer over several times despite the crew's efforts, damaging it so badly it never flew again; Orville eventually restored it, and in 1948 it was installed permanently in the Smithsonian Institution.

  The Wrights telegraphed their father asking him to "inform press," but the Dayton Journal declined to run the story, judging the flights too brief to matter. A telegraph operator leaked the message to a Virginia newspaper anyway, which published a wildly inaccurate account that other papers, including ones in Dayton, reprinted the next day. The genuine news barely stirred public interest in the United States. In Paris, however, members of the Aero Club of France, already primed by Chanute's reports of the brothers' gliding success, took the claim seriously and pushed harder to catch up. Decades later, a 1985 analysis by Professor Fred E. C. Culick and Henry R. Jex found the 1903 Flyer so unstable that almost no one but the Wrights, trained on their 1902 glider, could have managed it. When pilot Kevin Kochersberger tried to recreate the flight in an exact replica on the 100th anniversary, the 17th of December 2003, he failed to match what the brothers had pulled off a century before.

• 6. Doubted On Both Sides Of The Atlantic

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  Rather than pay to haul equipment back to the Outer Banks, the Wrights built the 1904 Wright Flyer II and set up a new airfield at Huffman Prairie, a cow pasture eight miles northeast of Dayton owned by bank president Torrance Huffman, who let them use it rent-free. They invited reporters to their first attempt of the season, on the 23rd of May, on the condition that no photographs be taken, but engine trouble and slack wind kept the machine on the ground; a brief hop days later, seen by fewer reporters, was similarly unimpressive. Library of Congress historian Fred Howard later speculated the brothers may have let reporters lose interest on purpose. Whatever the reason, local newspapers largely ignored the Wrights for the next year and a half, which suited brothers who feared rival inventors more than obscurity, and who had begun withdrawing from the bicycle business to focus on selling airplanes at real financial risk.

  Through the summer, hard landings at Huffman Prairie repeatedly damaged the aircraft and caused minor injuries, until a fix for longitudinal stability and a weight-powered catapult, first used on the 7th of September, made takeoffs more reliable. On the 20th of September 1904, Wilbur flew the first complete circle in history by a powered, heavier-than-air machine, covering 4,080 feet in about a minute and a half. Their two best flights of the year, by Wilbur on the 9th of November and by Orville on the 1st of December, each lasted more than five minutes and covered nearly three miles. Across 105 flights that year the brothers logged about 50 minutes total in the air over the same 85-acre pasture, ground that survives today, largely unchanged, as part of the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park.

  A new aircraft, the Flyer III, flew no better at first when it debuted in June 1905, and a crash on the 14th of July nearly killed Orville. After enlarging and repositioning the elevator and rudder, and giving the rudder its own independent control instead of linking it to the wing-warping cradle, the brothers flew a run of long flights between the 26th of September and the 5th of October, one lasting 38 minutes and covering 24.5 miles before the fuel simply ran out. Only the brothers themselves photographed these flights, a fact that fed the skepticism to come. An Ohio beekeeping businessman, Amos Root, saw several of the 1904 flights and wrote them up for his own beekeeping magazine, the only published eyewitness account besides the unimpressive May hop. When Root offered his report to Scientific American, the editor turned it down, and outside Ohio the story remained largely unknown. In 1906 the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune ran a skeptical headline asking, "Flyers or liars?" J. M. Cox, who then published the Dayton Daily News, later admitted candidly, "Frankly, none of us believed it."

  Meanwhile the American military, still smarting after spending $50,000 to watch Langley's Great Aerodrome plunge twice into the Potomac River, showed little interest in claims from two unknown bicycle makers who refused to fly without a signed sales contract first. As Santos-Dumont, Henri Farman, Leon Delagrange, and Glenn Curtiss began drawing attention elsewhere, French skeptics converted their own press to an anti-Wright stance, openly calling the brothers bluffeurs. Ernest Archdeacon, founder of the Aero-Club de France, insisted in 1906 that French aviators would achieve the first genuine public demonstration of powered flight. The Paris edition of the New York Herald summed up the mood on the 10th of February 1906: "The Wrights have flown or they have not flown. They are in fact either fliers or liars."

• 7. Paris Believes

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  On the 24th of October 1905, the brothers formally offered their invention to the U.S. Department of War, the British War Office, and a French syndicate, only to be told by the Board of Ordnance and Fortification that it would act only once a working machine had already carried an operator in flight. Wilbur later summarized the standoff: "It was not till May of this year that experiments were resumed at Kill Devil Hill." A 1907 trip to Europe put Wilbur face to face with U.S. Army lieutenant Frank P. Lahm, whose report back to his superiors helped secure Wilbur a hearing before the Board of Ordnance in Washington, this time a favorable one. The Army Signal Corps issued a formal specification in December 1907, awarded the Wrights a contract on the 8th of February 1908, and on the 23rd of March a separate French syndicate, including Lazare Weiller, Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe, Hart O. Berg, and Charles Ranlett Flint, signed on as well.

  Back at Kitty Hawk in May 1908 to practice for contracted demonstration flights, the brothers lost the privacy they once guarded so closely, as correspondents including Cornell engineering student John C. Burkhart arrived to watch. Dayton mechanic Charlie Furnas became the first fixed-wing airplane passenger on separate flights with both brothers on the 14th of May, but the practice ended abruptly when Wilbur crashed into the sand at about 50 miles per hour, bruised and battered, after over-controlling the elevator.

  Wilbur then sailed for Europe while Orville stayed to fly near Washington, splitting the brothers' obligations. Facing open scorn from a French press that called him a bluffeur, Wilbur made his first official public flight on the 8th of August 1908 at the Hunaudieres horse racing track near Le Mans, lasting just 1 minute 45 seconds. His effortless banking turns stunned onlookers, including French aviator Louis Bleriot, and the figure-eights he flew in the following days converted a skeptical public into a devoted one. L'Aerophile editor Georges Besancon wrote that the flights "have completely dissipated all doubts," and Ernest Archdeacon, once the sharpest critic, admitted, "They are today hallowed in France, and I feel an intense pleasure... to make amends." On the 7th of October 1908, Edith Berg, wife of the brothers' European business agent, became the first American woman to fly as a passenger, one of many that autumn including Griffith Brewer and Charles Rolls. Wilbur also grew close to automobile manufacturer Leon Bollee and his wife Carlotta, who translated technical talks and was heavily pregnant when Wilbur arrived in Le Mans that June; he promised to make his first French flight the day her baby was born, and did, on the 8th of August, later becoming godfather to her daughter Elizabeth.

  Orville, meanwhile, demonstrated a nearly identical Flyer to the U.S. Army at Fort Myer, Virginia, starting on the 3rd of September 1908, and on the 9th flew the first hour-long flight in history, lasting 62 minutes 15 seconds. On the 17th of September, Army lieutenant Thomas Selfridge rode along as an official observer when a propeller split at about 100 feet, sending the Flyer out of control. Selfridge died that evening of a fractured skull, the first fatality in an airplane crash, while Orville survived with a broken left leg and four broken ribs. Their sister Katharine, a schoolteacher, rushed from Dayton and stayed at Orville's bedside through seven weeks of hospitalization, even helping negotiate a one-year extension to the Army contract. Asked by a hospital visitor whether the crash had cost him his nerve, Orville replied, "The only thing I'm afraid of is that I can't get well soon enough to finish those tests next year."

  Shaken by the accident, Wilbur pushed himself to new records for altitude and duration, winning the Commission of Aviation prize on the 28th of September and the Coupe Michelin that December 31st. By January 1909, Orville and Katharine had joined him in France, and for a time the three Wrights were among the most famous people alive, watched by the kings of Great Britain, Spain, and Italy. Relocating to Pau, the brothers established the world's first flying school and trained three French military pilots, Charles de Lambert, Paul Tissandier, and Paul-Nicolas Lucas-Girardville. In Rome that April, Wilbur trained three more, Italian pilots Mario Calderara, Umbert Savoia, and Guido Castagneris, while a Universal cameraman flying as his passenger filmed the first motion pictures ever shot from an airplane. Returning home on the 13th of May 1909, the family was received at the White House, where President Taft presented them with awards on the 10th of June, followed by a two-day homecoming celebration in Dayton. On the 27th of July, before a crowd of 10,000 that included Taft's cabinet and members of Congress, Orville completed the U.S. Army's proving flights, earning the brothers $25,000 plus a bonus for every mile per hour above the required 40. That September in Germany, Orville flew a demonstration at Tempelhof with the Crown Prince of Germany as a passenger, and on the 4th of October, Wilbur flew a loop over Manhattan's Hudson River watched by roughly a million New Yorkers, his aircraft fitted with a canoe underneath in case it had to ditch.

  On the 25th of May 1910, back at Huffman Prairie, Orville took Wilbur up for a six-minute flight, the only time the two brothers ever flew together, something their father had long asked them to avoid so one would survive to carry on the work. Later that same day, Orville flew their 82-year-old father, Milton, on the only powered flight of his life, rising to about 350 feet while the elder Wright called out, "Higher, Orville, higher!" Twelve years after the Fort Myer crash, X-rays would reveal it had also fractured Orville's hip in three places and dislocated it, an injury nobody had caught at the time.

• 8. The Patent War

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  Wilbur and Orville wrote their original patent application themselves in 1903, and the patent office rejected it outright. After hiring Ohio patent attorney Henry Toulmin in January 1904, they were finally granted U.S. Patent 821,393 on the 22nd of May 1906, covering a method of controlling a flying machine rather than the machine itself, including wing-warping and its coordinated use with a steerable rear rudder to prevent adverse yaw. Glenn Curtiss and other early aviators built their own version of lateral control, called ailerons, to achieve similar results. Soon after Curtiss's own historic one-kilometer flight on the 4th of July 1908, Orville warned him directly, writing, "Claim 14 of our patent no. 821,393, specifically covers the combination which we are informed you are using." Curtiss, a member of Alexander Graham Bell's Aerial Experiment Association, refused to pay a license and instead sold an airplane fitted with ailerons to the Aeronautic Society of New York in 1909, prompting the Wrights to sue, along with foreign aviators who flew at U.S. exhibitions, including Frenchman Louis Paulhan.

  The legal fight dragged on for years and crossed oceans. A French ruling favored the Wrights, but the case was not settled before their patent expired there in 1917, while a German court ruled the patent invalid, citing Wilbur's own 1901 public lectures as prior disclosure. In February 1913, the Wrights won their case against Curtiss in the United States when a judge ruled ailerons fell under their patent, a decision a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld in January 1914, though Curtiss's company kept avoiding penalties through further legal maneuvering. From 1910 until his death from typhoid fever in 1912, Wilbur led the fight personally, traveling constantly to consult lawyers and testify in what he considered a moral cause. The distraction cost them: by 1911, Wright airplanes were widely seen as inferior to European designs, and when the United States entered World War I in April 1917, no acceptable American-designed airplane existed, forcing American forces to fly French machines instead. Orville and Katharine came to believe Curtiss bore some responsibility for the exhaustion that hastened Wilbur's early death.

  The lawsuits also cost the brothers their public reputation, turning former admirers into critics who called them greedy, and ending a ten-year friendship with Octave Chanute after he publicly criticized their conduct. On the 22nd of November 1909 the brothers incorporated the Wright Company, selling their patents to it for $100,000 plus a share of stock and a royalty on every airplane sold, with Wilbur as president and Orville as vice president. Orville, after winning the Curtiss case outright, chose not to press for a full monopoly, and sold his stake in the company in 1915. When the United States entered the war in 1917, government pressure finally forced the industry into a cross-licensing pool that ended the patent war for good, though smaller disputes lingered into the 1920s. In 1929, the Wright Aeronautical Corporation merged with the Curtiss Aeroplane Company, the very rival that had started the war, to form the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, a company that still manufactures aerospace components today.