The
Wright Brothers

Wilbur and Orville Wright were photographed
by the French
aviator Leon Bollée in May 1909. Their triumphs and travails
were as much consequences of their
approach to life
as of their approach to the
problems of flight.
By the first decade of the twentieth century, interest and
work in the field of flight had reached a
fever pitch. As highly
publicized efforts by engineers and scientists to
develop an airplane capable
of carrying a person were underway
in Europe and America, two brothers from
Dayton, Ohio, were quietly,
doggedly, and methodically
teaching themselves everything there was to
know about flying, and
inventing all the rest as the need arose. What
exactly drove the Wright
brothers to embark on the odyssey
that led them to Kitty Hawk is not at all clear,
and even definitive
biographies like Tom Crouch’s The
Bishop’s Boys have trouble penetrating those two
inscrutable minds. And that’s just the way they would
have wanted it.

This 1900 glider, in a wind from the left,
was moored by a wire below and raised or lowered by a wire (not visible in the
photo) that
pulled the forward elevator up or down.
Wilbur was
born in 1867, and Orville four
years later the third and sixth of
seven children born to Milton and
Susan Koerner Wright. Milton was a
minister in the United Brethren
Church, an evangelical Protestant
denomination, and the family moved frequently until
Milton was named a bishop in the church
and the family settled in
Dayton, Ohio. In childhood and throughout
their lives, Orville and Wilbur
were constant companions (in
‘Wilbur's words, the brothers “lived together, played
together; worked together, and, in fact, thought together”)
and displayed many of the Yankee characteristics of their
parents and forebears: an inner-directed spartan strength
and a clear-eyed, determined outlook on the world and on
life. Neither brother finished high school. though they were
both insatiable readers and tinkerers. The Wright brothers
tried their hand at several enterprises, including
publishing newspapers and running a printing shop, hut
without success.

Wilbur's drawings of the 1899 Kite, the Wright brothers'
first aeronautical experiment
In 1892, America was in the midst of a
bicycle craze and the brothers established a bicycle shop in
Dayton that proved financially successful. They manufactured
some bicycles under their own brand name, including one they
called the Flyer. During 1896, the Wrights read about the
death of Otto Lilienthal and they became intensely
interested in the question of flight. They collected all
existing information on flight, writing to Octave Chanute
and Samuel Langley at the Smithsonian, beginning an active
correspondence with these men that was to last for years.
Chanute (who regarded himself as a kind of international
clearinghouse of information about flight) was particularly
generous.
The Wrights designed a glider, strongly influenced
by Chanute’s design, and decided that their aircraft would
not be as difficult to fly as Lilienthal’s glider, but
neither were they going to be passive passengers on a an
inherently stable aircraft. They devised a method to control
an aircraft in flight that involved twisting a Chanute
design in a technique called “wing warping.”

With a pilot (in this
case, Oiville) warping the wing,
the glider banked as expected, but
would “slip” to the side
and invariably crash sideways into the sand.
There are many stories about how the
Wrights came upon wing warping, but the fact is that the
technique was not new, and at least one American
experimenter, E. F. Gallaudet, made use of it in kite tests
near New Haven, Connecticut, in 1898. With their customary
thoroughness, the Wrights also wrote to the U.S. Weather
Bureau to find out the best place to test aircraft. On the
basis of that information, they selected the Kill Devil
Hills sand dunes outside Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a
fishing village on the Outer Banks, a thin peninsula that
jutted out into the Atlantic and enjoyed strong and
relatively constant winds.
In 1899, they tested a scale model of a
glider in Dayton, and by the late summer of 1901 they were
ready to test-fly their first full-size glider at Kitty
Hawk. The trips to Kitty Hawk were arduous; a great deal of
material had to be brought along, some in pieces that would
be reassembled on site. The conditions were difficult and
the pair’s resolve and fortitude were tested to the limit by
heat, mosquitoes, storms, cold gale-force winds, and
isolation.

The solution was to place a double rudder
in the rear so the
glider would “bite” the wind when it banked into a turn, as
it does
here as Wilbur banks the glider in the 1902 tests. The pilot
is still lying
down in order to cut down wind resistance (“drag”).
The locals liked the Wrights and the
Wrights liked them, but the brothers’ natural reticence
caused some people to regard them as secretive—some believed
that was why Kitty Hawk was chosen as a test site in the
first place. But at this stage, the Wrights were not at all
hesitant to share their findings with fellow researchers. In
fact, in the midst of their experiments, Wilbur accepted an
invitation from Chanute to report on his and his brother’s
experiments at a meeting of the Western Society of Engineers
in Chicago, and many of the people Chanute kept bringing to
Kitty Hawk to assist them were, the Wrights well knew, doing
research of their own. The craft “flew” (it actually glided)
well enough, but with thirty percent less lift than the
Wrights had calculated.
They returned to Dayton and built a
larger craft with a front horizontal rudder (called a
“canard”), and returned to Kitty Hawk in
July 1901 to test it. The performance was improved and the
control bugs were worked out, but the Wrights were perplexed
about why their calculations were still off. Their response
to this was unique and would he reason enough to regard the
Wrights as the first to fly. They constructed a wind tunnel
in the rear of their bicycle shop and conducted precise
tests of different wing sections. The tunnel was only six
feet long by sixteen inches square, with a glass window in
the top panel to allow observation. A steady fan driven by a
small gas engine blew air through the box at a steady
twenty-seven miles per hour ), and inside, balance and
spring scales measured lift and pressure on a variety of
airfoils. In these experiments, the Wrights raised aviation
experimentation to the level of serious engineering (and
were thus more firmly in the tradition of Cayley and Langley
than anyone else had been for over a century).
These tests
were made in November and December 1 901; they collectively
represent one of the most important phases in the early
history of flight. The Wrights discovered that much of the
published data on airfoils was incorrect or had ignored
important elements of an airfoil in flight. They arrived at
a clear idea of how the centre of pressure moves about an
airfoil in relation to the angle of attack and as a function
of the camber. And they knew what the control surfaces would
need to be able to do if the flight was to be controlled by
the pilot. After testing two hundred different wing
surfaces, the brothers used their newly gained information
to design Glider Number 3. It was equipped with a forward
elevator wing and a rear fixed double fin that was later
made adjustable, with its controls connected to the
wing-warping controls for the main biplane wing section.
They returned to Kitty Hawk in September and tested their
new machine in more than one thousand glides. It not only
performed well, it performed as predicted. It was only now
that the Wrights felt they were on the verge of succeeding
in creating a powered airplane. They filed for a patent in
March 1903, and turned their attention to the last hurdle:
turning their glider into a flier.
The decade from the December 1903 flight of the Flyer at
Kitty Hawk to the outbreak of World
War 1 in August
1914 was an extraordinarily busy one in the
development of aviation. Looking
at the aircraft being built in
1913 and comparing them to those
built in 1904, it is difficult to
believe that only a decade had
passed. Airplanes like Louis
Bechereau’s Deperdussin Racer and
Geoffrey de Havilland’s B.S.1,
both produced in 1913, were built with
enclosed, metal fuselages
that used “monocoque” design:
instead of just the frame, the entire fuselage supported the
plane’s load. These planes are recognizable early
versions of planes produced thirty
and forty years later, while the
spindly frames of the Wrights’ airplanes and the
early flying machines were by that
time only relics.
The Wright brothers had clearly
uncorked a torrent of industry and
creativity that had simply been waiting for some indication
that the prospect of flight was not
hopeless. But if the
Wrights were the spark that ignited the
enterprise, there were other forces at
work that drove it to a
fever pitch. One was the giddy optimism that characterized
the opening of the new century.
True, the twentieth century’s ambivalence about technology
was born in its very
first decade, but in the face of the many advances
from 1900 to 1914, it really began to look as if
technology could and would make just about anything
possible.
The Wrights played a
large part in the forming of this
attitude: the remoteness of their experiments gave
fuel to the claims made
by such prestigious publications as The
New York Times and Scientific American that their
flights were a hoax. One
can imagine these publications being
much more careful afterward in
their scepticism about any
scientific and technological claims.
Yet, there was the equally powerful sense
that a war was coming, and
that one result of the industrialisation
of Europe would be an improved ability to conduct
armed conflict. What role
aviation would play in the theatre of war was not clear even
to the most visionary planner but
there was no doubt that aircraft (both heavier
and lighter than air) would be exploited by
combatants to the fullest
and that command of the sky could possibly
be a decisive factor in any
war. Military strategists who
prepared for possible invasions across natural barriers
such as the English Channel
or the Alpine mountains had to
rethink their defences in the light of aerial
warfare of unknown
effectiveness.
Behind all the hoopla of the
races, the feats, the records, the
stunts, the glamour and
derring-do—all the romance of early aviation—were
calculating minds fully aware (or
aware enough to take anxious
notice) of the military potential of flight.
In the decade between Kitty
Hawk and the outbreak of World War
I, one can summarize the history of
aviation very simply: while the Wrights and Curtiss
were slugging each other senseless
in court, the Europeans
slowly took the lead in aviation. The Wrights won
many of their court battles, but
lost the war for supremacy in
the air.
They enjoyed two crowning moments in the
decade following Kitty
Hawk: their exhibition in France
and their test for the Army at Ft. Myer. But they
allowed many opportunities
to slip by: while Curtiss was winning
prizes for aviation feats he was
performing years after the
Wrights had passed that level of technology, the brothers
were too proud or secretive
to claim any prize; while Curtiss
was winning races that the Wrights could
have won handily, the
brothers would not consent to enter any
contests; while Curtiss was
gaining fame participating in
aerial exhibitions and air shows, the Wrights regarded
them as circuses unworthy
of their talents; while Curtiss was
forming productive and useful alliances with a wide range of
people—from Bell and the Smithsonian to August Herring,
Octave Chanute’s old assistant to Henry Ford and his
high-priced patent lawyers—the Wrights steadfastly rebuffed
any offer of collegiality (including from Curtiss) and
preferred to go it alone; while Curtiss developed new
technology as quickly as it became available—he abandoned
wing warping when it became clear ailerons were a superior
means of lateral control; he developed wheeled
undercarriages when they were shown to be preferable to
skids; and he experimented with different engines and
configurations
The Wrights never strayed far from the basic
design configuration they inherited from Chanute; and while Curtiss developed the entire field of naval aviation,
developing seaplanes that could consider attempting to cross
the Atlantic Ocean, the Wrights entered the field belatedly
and half-heartedly.
But for a moment, the Wrights were alone
at the pinnacle of the mountain, and their country and the
world paid them homage. Wilbur died of typhoid fever in
1912, but Orville lived until 1947. Orville was honoured
late in his life for the contribution he and his brother had
made to flight, but he certainly must have wondered what
might have been had Wilbur lived. Publicly he blamed Curtiss
and the Smithsonian for everything (even Wilbur’s death),
but Curtiss retired from active involvement in aviation in
1921 and turned to real estate speculation in Florida until
his death after an appendectomy in 1930. So it was hardly
the case that it was all Curtiss’ fault. Typically, Orville
never voiced any regrets for letting the dominion of flight
slip through his fingers. Still, one wonders.
Kill
Devil Hill, December 17, 1903
After the Wright brothers’ successful
glides in the summer of 1902, it was time to add an engine
and propellers to the machine. Typically, however, the
Wrights did not simply add a power plant to their glider;
they redesigned the entire machine and integrated the
propulsion system in a technically well-designed machine.
The added weight of an engine meant they could increase the
camber (which would result in the centre of pressure
behaving about the same as it did for the glider), and
enlarge the wing to a forty-foot wingspan and a surface area
of 510 square feet for the two wings combined.

Wright wind tunnel
The machine—which they called the Flyer I
(only later was its name changed to the Kitty Hawk)—retained
the glider’s front canard-design elevator and the movable
rear rudder. The plan was to place the engine on the lower
wing, next to the pilot who would, as was the case with the
gliders, lie prone on the lower wing. The propellers would
be “pusher” (meaning, pushing the machine from behind the
wing, as opposed to “tractor,” which means pulling the
machine in front of the wing) and would turn in
counter-directions. As they had done with the wings, the
Wrights had tested and perfected the propellers in their
wind tunnel and greatly improved their efficiency. Unlike
the gliders, the Flyer could not be launched by leaping from
a dune or by running down a hill; it would then be only a
powered glide and not a real flight. They designed a launch
mechanism that consisted of a single track on which ran a
simple flat car that the aircraft was placed upon.
The car would be propelled by the
aircraft’s propellers, and when take-off speed was attained,
the airplane would simply lift off. The Wrights calculated
that they would need sixty feet of track (and that is what
they brought). The Wrights had put off the question of the
engine, hoping that the strides being made in the automotive
industry would produce a light and powerful engine they
could use. But no such engine was forthcoming and finally
they attacked the problem head-on and designed their own
engine with the help of their machinist, Charles Taylor. The
engine just barely met their specifications, but they
decided not to postpone testing it. They did not arrive at
Kitty Hawk that year until September 26 and were not ready
to test their machine until winter was already setting
in.
It was too cold even for Chanute, who had
waited patiently as long as he could. After many delays and
repairs, on December 14 the Flyer seemed ready. The
brothers, aware that they were about to make history, tossed
a coin to see who would have the honour of the first flight.
Wilbur won. On the first attempt, however, the elevator was
set low and the craft ploughed into the sand at the end of
the track, damaging the aircraft. After three days of
frantic repairs and threatening weather, the Wrights were
ready for a second try. They raised a flag signalling the
crew of the lifesaving station that they were ready, and
when a small group arrived, Orville took his turn on the
lower wing. At 10:35 A.M. on December 17, before several
witnesses from the weather station, the Flyer took off into
a twenty-one-mile-per-hour (34kph) wind. Wilbur ran
alongside the aircraft, keeping the right wing from dragging
in the sand but being careful not to assist the plane down
the track; they wanted this to be an unassisted take-off.
Sensing that they would be successful on
this day, they had set up their cumbersome glass-plate
camera and aimed it at the end of the track. They instructed
one of the witnesses, John T. Daniels, to snap the shutter
as the plane left the end of the track. Daniels took one of
the most famous photographs in the history of aviation,
possibly in the history of all of technology. It shows the
Flyer lifting off with Orville aboard, and Wilbur off to the
side having just run down the track alongside. The Flyer
flew for twelve seconds and landed in the sand 120 feet
away.

The first flight by man with a motor driven,
heavier-than-air machine, at Kitty Hawk, NC, December 17,
1903.
The brothers quickly placed the
Flyer on the launching car for another
flight. This time Wilbur
piloted the craft and it flew
almost two hundred feet before
landing gently in the sand. In
all, they conducted four
flights, alternating as pilots, with the
best flight the fourth: 852 feet in fifty-nine
seconds. After the fourth
flight, a gust of wind overturned the
aircraft and damaged it beyond
quick repair. The brothers
knew they would be returning to
Dayton. They ate a leisurely
lunch, then went into Kitty
Hawk, called a few friends to report on their
success, and sent a telegram to
their father: “Success four flights
Thursday morning all against twenty
one mile wind started from Level with engine power alone
average speed through air thirty one miles longest 57
seconds inform Press home Christmas. (signed) Orville.”
Contrary to legend, the reaction of the press to the
historic flight was not a deafening silence. The Dayton
Evening Herald reported the flight the next day on the front
page, and the Virginian-Pilot was careful to point out in a
sub-headline that no balloon had been attached to the
aircraft. Garbled accounts appeared on the front page of the
New York Herald, but there was little follow-up and many of
the sporadic reports that appeared during the first two
years after Kitty Hawk ridiculed the Wrights’ claim by
adding facetious exaggerations to the account. The first
full, serious, and accurate account of the Wrights in flight
appeared in the January 1, 1905, issue of Gleanings in Bee
Culture, an apiary journal, written by the publisher, Amos
I. Root. But the Wrights were not people to waste time. On
their return to Dayton, they immediately set to work on the
Flyer 2. incorporating all that they had learned in the
Carolina dunes. It looked like the first machine, but had a
smaller wing surface and a gentler camber. Most importantly,
it had a more powerful engine.

The Wright brothers and the Wright Flyer 2 at Huffman
Prairie near Dayton, Ohio in 1904
The brothers rented a
ninety-acre (36ha) farm outside of Dayton that became known
as “Huffman Prairie” (after the owner) and tested their new
machine there. On September 20, 1904, Wilbur flew the Flyer
2 in a complete circle and returned to his starting point
and landed. This was the flight Root witnessed and
described, and in the minds of some aviation historians,
this flight and the others conducted at Huffman (and not the
four Kitty Hawk flights) deserve to be considered the
beginning of the age of flight. (Others point out, however,
that these take-offs were not unassisted: to compensate for
the lighter winds, the Wrights launched their aircraft at
Huffman with a weight-and-derrick launcher.) The best flight
of the season, four circles of the field, lasted over five
minutes.
In the summer of 1905, the Wrights tested an even
more improved machine, Flyer 3, as always, in full view of
onlookers and inviting the press to important tests, which
they rarely attended. The aircraft had an even smaller wing
surface but the same camber as the 1903 machine. This time
the machine flew beautifully, and many of the more than
forty flights conducted were limited only by the amount of
fuel the aircraft could carry. The plane could take off and
land with minimal adjustment, and the elevator and rear
rudder, pushed out farther from the wings, gave the pilot
almost complete control of the aircraft in flight. The
longest flight of that summer was over a half hour, and the
aircraft could circle and fly figure eights easily. This
aircraft, the Flyer 3, is often referred to as the first
practical aircraft in history.

Wright Model "A", rear view on ground, Montgomery, AL 1910
In 1905, the brothers sensed
trouble when their patent application of two years earlier
was delayed. The U.S. War Department was unenthusiastic
about their proposal to build airplanes for the Signal
Corps, and they kept hearing rumours that competitors were
copying their designs. The patent (for wing warping) was
granted eventually in 1906, and the U.S. government
eventually came around, but the challenge from rivals—one in
particular: Glenn Curtiss—proved to be one hurdle too many.
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