Wright · 1903
The Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk
At ten thirty-five in the morning of Thursday the seventeenth of December 1903, on a flat strip of sand at the south end of Kill Devil Hills, a dune-and-grass settlement about four miles south of the fishing-village of Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the American bicycle-mechanics-and-aviation-pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright (Orville, thirty-two, the younger brother; Wilbur, thirty-six, the elder; both of Welsh-and-English ancestry on the paternal Wright line of the Wilbur-and-Orville great-great-grandfather Captain Daniel Wright the 1657 English-Puritan-emigrant to Massachusetts) made the first powered, controlled, sustained heavier-than-air flight in human history. The flight, in the Wright-Flyer-One (a twelve-horsepower-engine biplane of about six hundred pounds total weight, with a forty-foot wingspan and a pusher-propeller configuration), was made by Orville lying flat across the lower wing, hand on the pitch-control elevator, the engine running at full throttle on the launching-rail. The flight ran twelve seconds, covered about a hundred and twenty feet, reached an altitude of about ten feet, and landed safely in soft sand. Wilbur flew the fourth flight of the morning (the brothers had alternated flights all morning on the pre-arranged turn-and-turn-about) for fifty-nine seconds and eight hundred and fifty feet, the longest of the four December 17 flights. Powered controlled flight had been demonstrated.
It is twenty past ten on the morning of Thursday the seventeenth of December 1903, on the flat strip of sand at the south foot of Kill Devil Hills, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina (about four miles south of the Kitty Hawk fishing-village, the Atlantic ocean to the east, the Albemarle Sound to the west), in the cold winter morning light off the Atlantic, with a twenty-seven-mile-an-hour northerly headwind. He is thirty-two years old. He is Orville Wright, born at 7 Hawthorne Street in Dayton, Ohio, on the nineteenth of August 1871, son of the United Brethren in Christ Church Bishop Milton Wright and Susan Catherine Koerner, schooled at Dayton Central High School (Orville did not graduate; he and Wilbur ran the Wright Cycle Company bicycle-and-printing-press shop at 1127 West Third Street in Dayton from 1892).
On the launching-rail in front of him is the Wright-Flyer-One, the pre-completed biplane the brothers have been building at the Kitty-Hawk camp since the twenty-fifth of September. The Flyer has a forty-foot-and-four-inch wingspan, a twelve-horsepower four-cylinder engine custom-built by the Wright-Cycle-Company mechanic Charles Taylor, two pusher-propellers driven by chains from the engine, and a canard-elevator-and-twin-rudder control-system. The total weight is six hundred and five pounds. The pilot lies flat across the lower-wing centre-section, with a control-saddle that operates the elevator, the rudder, and the wing-warping that gives the Flyer its roll-control.
He thinks: the twenty-seven-mile-an-hour headwind is enough to get the Flyer off the launching-rail at the pre-calculated thirty-five-mile-an-hour ground-speed. The Flyer engine, at twelve horsepower and the propeller-thrust of ninety pounds, will produce the pre-calculated airspeed of about thirty miles an hour in the headwind. The airspeed-and-ground-speed differential is enough.
He thinks: the first flight was Wilbur's at three-and-a-half hours ago. Wilbur stalled the Flyer at about three feet altitude after twelve feet and pancaked it back onto the launching-rail. The stall was the pilot's-inexperience error and not a Flyer-design problem. The launching-rail and the skid-landing-gear took the impact without damage. We have re-set the Flyer for the second attempt.
He thinks: the five-witness list this morning is John T. Daniels of the Kitty-Hawk life-saving station (with the Wright-supplied glass-plate camera on a tripod, pre-aimed at the launching-rail end-point), Will S. Dough also of the life-saving station, Adam Etheridge also of the life-saving station, William C. Brinkley (a local visiting from Manteo), and Johnny Moore (a sixteen-year-old local boy). The photograph Daniels will take with the Wright-camera is the historical-record photograph of the Flyer leaving the launching-rail.
Orville lies flat across the lower-wing centre-section. He releases the restraining-wire at ten-thirty-five. The Flyer accelerates down the sixty-foot launching-rail, leaves the rail at the rail-end, climbs to about ten feet altitude, levels off at about ten feet altitude, flies for twelve seconds and a hundred and twenty feet of ground-distance, and lands on the soft sand at the end of the strip. The flight is the first powered, controlled, sustained heavier-than-air human flight.
Wilbur flew the second flight of the day at eleven-twenty (covering about a hundred and seventy-five feet in twelve seconds, the second flight in history). Orville flew the third at eleven-forty (about two hundred feet in fifteen seconds). Wilbur flew the fourth at noon and stayed in the air for fifty-nine seconds, covering eight hundred and fifty-two feet of ground-distance (the longest of the four December 17 flights). On the fourth flight's landing, the elevator was damaged when the Flyer pitched up sharply just before touchdown; before they could repair it, a gust of wind picked up the parked Flyer and rolled it over onto the sand, destroying it. The Wright-Flyer-One never flew again. The Wright brothers had completed four sustained powered controlled flights in a single morning and the Flyer was, by the evening, a twisted wreck.
Wilbur Wright died of typhoid fever at the Wright family home in Dayton, Ohio, on the thirtieth of May 1912, forty-five years old. Orville survived until 30 January 1948 (he died of a heart attack on the way to his Hawthorn Hill Dayton home, age seventy-six). The Wright Flyer One was rebuilt by Orville in the 1920s, was loaned to the Science Museum in London in 1928 (on a twenty-year-loan dispute with the Smithsonian), and was finally placed on permanent exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC on the seventeenth of December 1948 (the forty-fifth anniversary of the Kitty-Hawk flights and ten months after Orville's death). It is the most-visited single artefact in the Smithsonian collection. The Kill Devil Hills site is, since 1932, the Wright Brothers National Memorial; the launching-rail-spot is marked by a bronze-plate marker on the sand.