The Wright Brothers(1867–1948)

Wilbur Wright was born at Millville in Indiana on the sixteenth of April 1867 and Orville Wright at Dayton in Ohio on the nineteenth of August 1871, the third and sixth surviving children of Bishop Milton Wright of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ and Susan Catherine Koerner. The paternal line was English-Puritan New England, descending from one Captain Samuel Wright who crossed from England to Massachusetts in the mid-seventeenth century. The maternal line was German-Swiss. The two brothers were raised on the road between United Brethren parishes in Indiana and Ohio, schooled at Dayton, and from an early age treated as a single intellectual partnership. Neither finished high school. Both kept account-books in the manner of a Wright-of-the-old-trade carpenter, with the column-arithmetic of a shop floor.

In 1892 they opened the Wright Cycle Company at 1127 West Third Street in Dayton, selling and repairing bicycles and within three years building bicycles of their own design under the names Van Cleve and St Clair. The shop was their working capital for the next eighteen years. In 1899, after the death of the German aeronautical experimenter Otto Lilienthal in a glider accident, Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution for the published literature on heavier-than-air flight; they read everything in it through the autumn and concluded, by methodical examination of the Lilienthal and Langley lift tables, that the published numbers could not be trusted. They built a wind tunnel of their own in the back of the bicycle shop, six feet long and sixteen inches square, and through the winter of 1901 to 1902 generated the first reliable lift-and-drag data in the history of aerodynamics for over two hundred wing profiles, measured at controlled wind speeds with instruments they had designed for the purpose.

Through 1900, 1901 and 1902 they tested gliders of progressively refined design at Kill Devil Hills, four miles south of the fishing-village of Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, chosen for its steady ocean breeze and its soft sand. The 1902 glider, built to the corrected lift tables, made nearly a thousand controlled flights, the longest of twenty-six seconds, and demonstrated for the first time three-axis control of a heavier-than-air machine through wing-warping for roll, an elevator for pitch and a movable rudder for yaw. The Wright system of three-axis control, patented in 1906 as US Patent 821,393, is the control architecture of every fixed-wing aircraft built since.

On the morning of the seventeenth of December 1903, in a wind of just over twenty miles an hour at the south end of Kill Devil Hills, Orville lying flat on the lower wing of the Wright Flyer with his hand on the elevator and a twelve-horsepower petrol engine built by their shopman Charles Taylor running at full throttle, the brothers made the first powered, controlled, sustained heavier-than-air flight in human history. The first flight ran twelve seconds and covered a hundred and twenty feet. The fourth flight of the morning, with Wilbur at the controls, ran fifty-nine seconds and eight hundred and fifty-two feet. Five witnesses were on the sand. The Flyer is preserved at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Through 1904 and 1905 they refined the design at Huffman Prairie outside Dayton into the Wright Flyer III, the world's first practical aeroplane, capable of sustained banking flight over thirty-minute circuits. In 1908 they took the machine to Europe; Wilbur's demonstration flights at the Hunaudières racecourse near Le Mans through August and September of that year, in front of the assembled European aeronautical establishment, ended any remaining doubt that they had done what they said.

Wilbur died of typhoid fever at Dayton on the thirtieth of May 1912 in his forty-fifth year. Orville sold his interest in the Wright Company in 1915, settled at Hawthorn Hill in the Dayton suburbs, served on the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (the predecessor of NASA) for the next twenty-eight years, and lived to see jet aircraft cross the Atlantic. He died at Dayton on the thirtieth of January 1948 in his seventy-seventh year. Within four decades of the twelve-second flight on the Outer Banks the brothers' invention had carried passengers across every ocean, fought two world wars, defined the strategic geography of the twentieth century, and, by the time of Orville's death, was within nineteen years of carrying men to the surface of the Moon. The wing-warping principle of the 1903 Flyer survives in the ailerons of every fixed-wing aircraft in the sky. The Wright name in modern aviation, in the patent literature of three-axis flight control, and on the small granite marker at the south end of Kill Devil Hills carries the weight of the wind-tunnel data the two brothers worked out in the back of a bicycle shop on West Third Street through the winter of 1901 to 1902.