The Wright Brothers: How Two Bicycle Makers Taught the World to Fly

Two Brothers from Dayton

Wilbur Wright was born on April 16, 1867, near Millville, Indiana, and his brother Orville on August 19, 1871, in Dayton, Ohio. They were two of the seven children of Milton Wright, a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, and Susan Koerner Wright, who was known in the family for her skill at building and fixing things. The family moved several times, but Dayton became their home for good.

Their fascination with flight began early. In 1878 their father brought home a small toy helicopter based on a design by the French aviation pioneer Alphonse Pénaud. It was made of paper, bamboo and cork and was powered by a twisted rubber band. The boys played with it until it broke, then built their own copies. They called it "the bat".

Neither brother received a high school diploma, and neither ever married. Wilbur had planned to attend Yale University, but in the winter of 1885–86 he was struck in the face by a hockey stick during a game on the ice. The injury left him withdrawn and unwell for several years. He stayed at home, cared for his mother, who was dying of tuberculosis, and read widely in his father's large library. Those quiet years gave him a habit of deep, careful study that would later prove essential.

Printers, Then Bicycle Makers

Before they ever thought seriously about airplanes, the brothers were small-business owners. Orville built a printing press and, with Wilbur's help, the pair published a local newspaper, the West Side News, in 1889. In 1892, as a bicycle craze swept the United States, they opened a shop to repair and sell bicycles, and a few years later they began making bicycles of their own design.

The bicycle business mattered in three ways. It earned the money that paid for their flying experiments. It gave them a fully equipped workshop and practical skill with light, strong machines, chains, sprockets and spokes. And it taught them an important idea: a bicycle is an unstable machine that a rider keeps upright through constant small corrections. The brothers suspected that an airplane would work the same way. Instead of trying to build a craft that was automatically stable, they wanted one that a pilot could actively control.

The Problem of Flight in the 1890s

By the 1890s, many inventors were trying to fly. The German engineer Otto Lilienthal had made around two thousand glides in hang gliders that he steered by shifting his body weight. In 1896 he was killed when one of his gliders stalled and crashed. His death deeply affected the Wrights and convinced them that the real unsolved problem was not lifting a machine into the air or powering it, but controlling it once it was there.

In 1899 Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington asking for publications on flight. He and Orville read everything they could find, including the work of the engineer Octave Chanute, who became a friend and adviser. They concluded that a flying machine needed three things: wings to lift it, an engine to drive it forward, and a way to control it. The first two were already being worked on by others. The third was where the brothers focused their attention.

Solving Control: Wing Warping and Three Axes

An aircraft can rotate in three ways, or around three axes:

• Pitch: the nose moving up or down.
• Roll: one wing dipping while the other rises.
• Yaw: the nose turning left or right.

Roll was the hardest to manage. The brothers had watched birds and noticed that they tilt their wingtips to keep their balance and to turn. Wilbur found a way to copy this while idly twisting an empty cardboard box in the bicycle shop. If the tips of a biplane's wings could be twisted in opposite directions, one side would gain lift and the other would lose it, rolling the machine. This method became known as wing warping. In 1899 they tested it on a kite with a wingspan of about 5 feet (1.5 m), controlled by strings, and it worked.

Later, in 1902, they added a movable rear rudder and linked it to the wing warping. This solved a dangerous problem in which the glider would swing sideways and slide toward the ground during a turn. With an elevator at the front for pitch, warping wings for roll and a rudder for yaw, the Wrights had created three-axis control. Modern aircraft use ailerons instead of warping wings, but the principle of controlling all three axes is still the basis of how every airplane is flown today.

Kitty Hawk and the Gliders

To test full-size gliders, the brothers needed steady winds, soft ground to land on and privacy. After consulting the U.S. Weather Bureau, they chose the Outer Banks of North Carolina, near the small fishing village of Kitty Hawk. Its high sand dunes and strong winds off the Atlantic were ideal. Each year from 1900 to 1903 they traveled there from Ohio, camping in tents and later in wooden sheds they built themselves.

Disappointment in 1901

Their 1900 glider flew mostly as an unmanned kite. The 1901 glider, larger than any glider flown before, was a disappointment: it produced far less lift than their calculations had predicted, and it was hard to control. The brothers returned home discouraged and close to giving up.

The Wind Tunnel

Instead of quitting, they questioned the data everyone else relied on. In the autumn of 1901 they built a small wind tunnel in their shop: a wooden box about 6 feet (1.8 m) long with a fan at one end. Inside, they placed balances made from bicycle spokes and old hacksaw blades, and used them to measure the lift and drag of about 200 small model wing shapes. The results showed that a widely used figure for calculating lift, known as Smeaton's coefficient, had been too high for over a century. With their new data, the brothers could design wings that would actually perform as planned.

The Successful 1902 Glider

The 1902 glider, built using the wind tunnel results and fitted with the new movable rudder, was a triumph. Over several weeks the brothers made hundreds of glides, the longest of them covering about 622 feet (190 m). They became skilled pilots in the process, which few of their rivals ever were. In March 1903 they applied for a patent on their control system.

Building the Wright Flyer

With control solved, the brothers needed an engine and propellers. No manufacturer could supply an engine that was both light enough and powerful enough, so their shop mechanic, Charlie Taylor, built one in about six weeks. It produced about 12 horsepower and had a crankcase cast in aluminum, a rare choice for the time, to save weight.

Propellers turned out to be a surprisingly difficult problem. Ship propellers were designed largely by trial and error, and no one had a theory for air propellers. The Wrights realized that a propeller is really a wing that spins, and used their wind tunnel data to design two efficient wooden propellers. These were driven by chains, much like a bicycle, and turned in opposite directions so that their twisting forces canceled out.

The finished machine, the Wright Flyer, was a biplane with a wingspan of about 40 feet (12 m), made of spruce and ash covered with fine cotton muslin. The pilot lay flat on the lower wing, controlling the elevator with a lever and the wing warping and rudder by moving his hips in a cradle.

December 17, 1903: The First Flights

On December 14, 1903, the brothers tossed a coin to decide who would go first. Wilbur won, but he pulled the nose up too sharply, and the Flyer stalled and settled into the sand after about three seconds. After repairs, they tried again on December 17, near the Kill Devil Hills, about four miles (6 km) south of Kitty Hawk. It was Orville's turn.

At about 10:35 in the morning, in a cold, strong wind, Orville flew for 12 seconds and covered 120 feet (37 m). It was a short hop, but it was the first time a piloted, engine-powered machine heavier than air had taken off under its own power, flown under control and landed on ground as high as its starting point. A local lifesaving station worker, John T. Daniels, who had never used a camera before, took the famous photograph of the moment, with Wilbur running alongside.

The brothers took turns and made three more flights that day. The fourth, piloted by Wilbur, lasted 59 seconds and covered 852 feet (260 m). Shortly afterward, a gust of wind flipped the parked Flyer over and badly damaged it. It never flew again. That evening the brothers sent a telegram to their father announcing their success and saying they would be home for Christmas.

From a Hop to a Practical Airplane

The 1903 flights proved that powered flight was possible, but the Flyer could not yet turn or stay up for long. The brothers spent the next two years turning it into a useful machine. To avoid the long trips to North Carolina, they flew at Huffman Prairie, a cow pasture outside Dayton.

• Wright Flyer II (1904): On September 20, 1904, Wilbur flew the first complete circle in an airplane. Because the winds at Huffman Prairie were weaker, the brothers built a launching catapult powered by a falling weight to help the Flyer reach flying speed.
• Wright Flyer III (1905): Often called the first truly practical airplane, it could bank, turn, circle and fly figure eights. On October 5, 1905, Wilbur flew about 24 miles (39 km) in just over 39 minutes, landing only when the fuel ran out.

One of the first people to write an eyewitness account of these flights was Amos Root, the publisher of a beekeeping magazine, Gleanings in Bee Culture. His report appeared in January 1905, long before most newspapers took the Wrights seriously.

Doubters, Fame and Tragedy

Few people believed the brothers' claims. They flew rarely in public, and from late 1905 to 1908 they did not fly at all, because they wanted to protect their invention until they had secured patents and sales contracts. In Europe, some critics openly called them bluffers.

That changed in 1908. In August, Wilbur flew at a racecourse near Le Mans, France. Spectators and European aviators were stunned by how easily he banked and circled, something their own aircraft could barely do. Almost overnight, the Wrights became world celebrities. In September, Orville began demonstration flights for the U.S. Army at Fort Myer, Virginia, setting new records for time in the air.

On September 17, 1908, tragedy struck. A propeller cracked during a flight, and the airplane crashed. Orville was badly injured, and his passenger, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, died, becoming the first person killed in a powered airplane crash. Orville recovered, and in 1909 the Army bought a Wright airplane, the first military airplane in the world. That same year, Wilbur flew around the Statue of Liberty during a celebration in New York, watched by huge crowds.

Later Years and Legacy

In 1909 the brothers founded the Wright Company to build airplanes. They spent much of the following years in legal battles over their patent, especially against the American aviator and manufacturer Glenn Curtiss. Wilbur, exhausted by business and lawsuits, caught typhoid fever and died on May 30, 1912, at the age of 45. Orville sold the company in 1915 and lived until January 30, 1948, long enough to see airplanes cross oceans and break the sound barrier.

Their sister Katharine Wright played a major role in their lives. A college graduate and teacher, she ran the household, managed the business while her brothers were away, and joined them in Europe, where she charmed royalty and the press.

A Long Dispute with the Smithsonian

For years the Smithsonian Institution suggested that its former secretary, Samuel Langley, had built the first airplane capable of flight, even though his Aerodrome had failed in tests in 1903. In protest, Orville sent the original 1903 Flyer to the Science Museum in London in 1928. The Smithsonian eventually withdrew its claim, and after Orville's death the Flyer returned to the United States. It is displayed today at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Pieces of the Flyer in Space

The Wright brothers' achievement has traveled much farther than Kitty Hawk. In 1969, Neil Armstrong carried a small piece of the original Flyer's wood and fabric to the Moon on Apollo 11. In 2021, NASA's Ingenuity helicopter, which made the first powered, controlled flight on another planet, carried a tiny piece of the Flyer's wing fabric to Mars. NASA named Ingenuity's first takeoff site Wright Brothers Field.

Today the place where it all began is protected as the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kill Devil Hills. The brothers' greatest lesson may be their method: they questioned accepted data, tested ideas carefully, learned to fly gliders before adding an engine, and treated failure as information. That way of thinking turned two bicycle makers from Ohio into the inventors of the airplane.