Wright

Wright comes from the Old English wryhta, in use by about 700, meaning a worker or shaper of wood and cognate with the word work itself. In northern Middle English and in Scots it was simply the word for a builder, taking a qualifier only when the timber was specialised: wheelwright, shipwright, boatwright, arkwright.

The rival word came with the Normans. Carpentier, from the Latin carpentarius, a maker of a carriage, arrived after 1066 with the Anglo-Norman of the new ruling class, and where it won, the surname Carpenter froze in place instead. The north and the midlands kept wright, hereditary there by 1300, and in Scotland the word never retreated at all: it is still current Scottish English for a skilled woodworker. By 2014 Wright was the eleventh most common surname in England. It is also the standard anglicisation of the Gaelic Mac an t-Saoir, MacIntyre, son of the wright.

The joints a medieval wright cut were ancient before England had a name: archaeologists have recovered a well in eastern Germany built some seven thousand years ago from split oak timbers with mortise-and-tenon joints and notched corners. Almost none of it was written down; it went hand to hand down the generations, and what survives is the work, in the eleventh-century fabric of Greensted church and the Norwegian stave churches of the twelfth and thirteenth.

Until the end of the nineteenth century a wright framed a building post and beam, the method now called timber framing. He was first onto the site and last off it: nothing began until the frame, the roof and the floors stood, and the doors, skirtings and window architraves went in after the plasterers.

The specialism the name most often marked was the wheelwright, and it is harder than it looks. A solid wheel cut from tree slabs needs little skill; a spoked wheel is lighter, can be built wider than the local trees allow, and demands precise spacing and careful calculation to come out a true circle. Districts with no wheelwright in reach kept making solid wheels long after.

The wheelwright worked outward from the centre: the nave, then the spokes tenoned into it, then the felloes that make up the rim. Elm for the nave, whose interwoven grain will not split when the spokes are driven home tight; oak for the spokes, because it does not bend or compress and carries load straight from rim to hub; ash for the felloes, springy enough to take the road like a suspension. Last came the tyre. A blacksmith made an iron tyre a little smaller than the wheel and heated it until it expanded, and it was hauled on with a levered hook and quenched, shrinking hard onto the rim and closing every joint at once.

Wright stayed a live occupational title until the middle of the nineteenth century, surviving mostly in compounds: wheelwright, wainwright for the man who built wains, shipwright, boatwright, arkwright, housewright, barnwright, and playwright, the only one still in daily English. Several hardened into surnames of their own, which is why Cartwright and Wainwright stand in the registers beside the plain Wright.

A shipwright built and repaired vessels afloat, and one rated to a ship's company as the ship's carpenter walked the carpenter's walk inside the hull at sea, looking for leaks. Housewright and barnwright were used the same way ashore, and are still heard among carpenters who work by traditional methods and materials. The plain Wright, with no qualifier, kept the wider sense: the word came to cover any occupational worker before it settled as a name.

Nobody became a wright by saying so. The trade ran on grades: apprentice, then journeyman on completing the term, then master after further years of proof. In Germany, Iceland and Japan the master qualification is still an arduous examination in legal and economic knowledge as well as craft, because only a master may employ and teach apprentices. Into the early twentieth century a newly made journeyman travelled to another region to learn its building styles before coming home with them.

In Scotland two burgh incorporations still carry the word in its old sense and still exist to promote the woodworking trade: the Incorporation of Wrights of the Trades House of Glasgow, and the Incorporation of Wrights and Masons of the Edinburgh Trades. In London the Worshipful Company of Wheelwrights still keeps the list of working wheelwrights in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

English surnames began as descriptions, not inheritances, taken from a man's trade or his father, and at first they died with him. The Domesday survey of 1086 is usually taken as the point at which family names entered England, and the historian Christopher Daniell identifies 1140 as perhaps the first recorded use of a surname carried by more than one generation. The habit began with the nobility and worked downward, resisted in late medieval England because registration by name meant taxation. By 1400 most English families and most in Lowland Scotland had hereditary surnames.

The pressure behind that was arithmetic. Of the boys born in London in 1510, 24.4 per cent were christened John, 13.3 per cent Thomas and 11.7 per cent William, so half the men in a street answered to three names between them. The trade tag told them apart, and written down often enough it became a name. That is also why bearers are so often not kin: Wright arose separately wherever a man worked wood, and two Wrights in one county record need not be kin at all.

The name's great figure in art is Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797), the foremost painter of the late Enlightenment. He worked in dramatic chiaroscuro, and what he chose to light were the candlelit scenes of the eighteenth-century scientific revolution.

An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, painted in 1768, is the picture the name is remembered by.

Wilbur Wright was born at Millville in Indiana on 16 April 1867 and Orville at Dayton in Ohio on 19 August 1871, sons of Bishop Milton Wright of the United Brethren. The paternal line was English-Puritan New England, descending from a Captain Samuel Wright who crossed from England to Massachusetts in the middle of the seventeenth century. Neither finished high school. In 1892 they opened the Wright Cycle Company at 1127 West Third Street in Dayton, building bicycles of their own design, and that shop was their working capital for eighteen years.

In 1899 Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution for everything published on heavier-than-air flight, and having read it the brothers concluded the accepted lift tables were wrong. So they built a wind tunnel in the back of the shop, six feet long and sixteen inches square, and there through the winter of 1901 to 1902 measured over two hundred wing profiles on instruments of their own design, producing the first reliable lift-and-drag data in aerodynamics. It is the method of the old trade exactly: measure the thing yourself, then cut.

Their 1902 glider, flown at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, showed three-axis control for the first time; patented in 1906, it is still the control architecture of every fixed-wing aircraft. On the morning of 17 December 1903, with Orville lying flat on the lower wing and a twelve-horsepower petrol engine at full throttle, they made the first powered, controlled, sustained heavier-than-air flight in history: twelve seconds, a hundred and twenty feet, five witnesses on the sand. The fourth flight of that morning, Wilbur at the controls, ran fifty-nine seconds and eight hundred and fifty-two feet.