Wright Brothers
Wilbur and Orville Wright invented and built the first successful airplane. On December 17, 1903, they made the worlds first flight in a powered driven machine near Kitty Hawk North Carolina. With Orville at the controls, the plane flew 120 feet and was in the air for 12 seconds. The brothers made three more flights that day, the longest, by Wilbur, was 852 feet in 59 seconds.
Wilbur Wright was born Aril 16, 1867, on a farm 8 miles from New Castle, Indiana, and Orville Wright was born August 19, 1871, in Dayton, Ohio. Their father was a bishop of the United Brethren Church. The boys went through high school, but neither received a diploma. Wilbur did not bother to go to the commencement
exercises, and Orville took special subjects rather than a prescribed course in his final year. Mechanics fascinated them even in childhood. To earn pocket money they sold homemade mechanical toys. Orville started a printing business, building his own press. They later launched a weekly paper, the West Side News, with Wilbur as editor. In 1892, Wilbur, 25, and Orville, 21, began to rent and sell bicycles. Then they began to manufacture them, assembling the machines in a room above their shop.
After reading about the death of a pioneer glider Otto Lilienthal in 1896, the brothers became interested in flying. They began serious reading on this subject in 1899, and soon obtained all the scientific knowledge of aeronautics available. The Wright’s selected narrow strip of sand called Kill Devil Hill, near the settlement of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to do all their testing.
In 1900, they tested their first glider that could carry a person. In 1901 they returned back to Kitty Hawk to test a larger glider. But neither the 1900 not the 1901 glider had the lifting power they had counted on. The brothers built
a third glider and took it to Kitty Hawk in the summer of 1902. This glider, based on their new figures, had aerodynamic qualities more advanced then any tried before. With it, they solved most of the problems of balance in flight. They made almost 1,000 glides in this model, and, on some, covered distances more than 600 feet.
Before leaving Kitty Hawk in 1902, the brothers started planning a power airplane. By the fall of 1903, they completed building the machine at a cost of less than $1,000. It had wings 10 ˝ feet long and weighed about 750 pounds with the pilot. They designed and built their own lightweight gasoline engine for the airplane. The Wright’s went to Kitty Hawk in September 1903, but because of bad storms and minor defects delayed their experiment at Kill Devil Hill until December 17. The brothers had eventually became skilled pilots. Their understanding of aerodynamics and ability as pilots set them apart from most others who tried and failed to fly powered airplanes. That day was the first flight in history by a powered airplane to be successful. It flew 12 seconds and 120 feet.
The Wright’s continued their experiments at a field near Dayton in 1904 and 1905. In 1904, they made 105 flights, but totaled only 45 minutes in the air. Two flights lasted five minutes each. On October 5, 1905, the machine flew 24.2 miles in 38 minutes 3 seconds. Wilbur died of typhoid fever on May 30th, 1912, just as the airplane was beginning to make great advances. Orville worked on it alone and in 1913 won the Collier Trophy for a device to balance airplanes automatically. He soon lost interest of experimental and competition, and retired in 1915. Although the Wright’s had finished inventing new models, the rest of the world had caught up. The French rapidly introduced refinements in 1910 to Wright design; monoplane wings, closed body, front propeller, rear elevator, single stick control, wheels, and ailerons. But the principle of the Wright’s control system was never changed. No one ever assumed that when Wilbur and Orville Wright were born would have an impact of the world forever.