In 1903, the New York Times completely underestimated how long it would take before anyone would
be able to fly, believing it would take 1 - 10 million years.
Truth be told, even the Wright brothers didn’t expect it to happen in their lifetime.
The elder brother, Wilbur, lamented after a failed flight: “Not within a thousand
years would man ever fly.”
Yet despite all this pessimism the dream became a reality two years later.
In 1903, the Wright brothers made their first powered flights above the outer banks of North
Carolina that lasted no more than a minute.
Two years later, they improved their ‘flying machine’ to such an extent that it was able
to fly 25 miles!
This is the story of how they achieved one of the greatest innovations of all time.
The Wright brothers had an interesting childhood growing up in Dayton, Ohio.
Their father, Milton, was a bishop.
Their mother, Susan, devoted her life to looking after her five children.
It was she who fostered an interest in engineering in her kids, having learned how to work with
tools and solve mechanical problems in her own father’s workshop.
Milton and Susan taught their children that the world was an unfriendly place filled with
temptations.
They believed the strength of family bonds offered their only real support.
It would help them face major crises, like when twins born after Wilbur and before Orville
died in infancy.
Milton’s preaching took him on the road often, and he’d bring back small toys for
his kids.
Once, he brought home a small model helicopter based on a design by the French aeronautical
pioneer Alphonse Pénaud.
This sketch was done by Orville.
Wilbur and Orville were fascinated by the toy and they developed a deep love of aeronautics
and flying.
Wilbur was a bright student and excelled at school.
He planned to attend Yale and become a teacher, but while in high school, an accident changed
his life.
When he was playing hockey, another player’s stick hit him in the face, and he lost his
front teeth.
Although his injuries weren’t severe, he became withdrawn.
And canceled his plans for college.
He spent much of his time at home, caring for his ill mother, who passed away from tuberculosis
a few years later.
Despite the unraveling of his future plans this would become the making of Wilbur.
It freed him to pursue other interests which would lead him to the airplane.
The Wright brothers grew up during a period of tremendous change in Dayton.
It was emerging as the center of manufacturing and industry – the perfect setting for two
entrepreneurial brothers.
Wilbur and Orville started several local newspapers.
And opened up bike shops at the peak of the cycling craze.
Their business renting, repairing, manufacturing, and selling bikes would later financially
support their aeronautical experiments.
Moving from bikes to planes was a natural leap.
Both require an understanding of balance and control.
The need for light yet strong structures.
And the ability to deal with wind resistance.
The earlier experimenters of flight thought humans would never be able to handle air currents
– their reflexes just weren’t made for it so they believed an aircraft had to be
stable in order for the pilot to maintain control.
However, the Wrights’ experience with their bicycles taught them otherwise.
If a highly unstable object like a bike could be controlled - why couldn’t a flying machine
be similarly tamed?
The brothers didn’t turn their sights to the skies until German aviator Otto Lilienthal,
the first person to make repeated flights with gliders, died when his glider stalled
and crashed in 1896.
They were determined to develop a more successful design.
Despite humanity’s centuries-old interest in flight, very little progress was made before
1800.
That began to change in the 1800s, when a community of technically trained people took
the first steps toward human flight.
Wilbur was one of them.
He wrote a letter to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington asking for any publications
they had to help him gain knowledge of human flight.
He said his purpose was to add his mite to help on the future worker who will attain
final success.
He didn’t think he’d achieve flight himself but perhaps pave the way for someone else.
The Wright brothers reduced the complications they faced down to three essentials:
A set of lifting surfaces or wings
A method of balancing and controlling the aircraft
A means of propulsion – the act of driving or pushing forward.
Most earlier experimenters focused only on one of the three yet the Wrights realized
they all had to be addressed.
When they set out to design the wings, they observed that birds angled their wings for
balance and control - they tried to emulate this, a concept called “wing warping”
Their first experiments involved wing-warping with kites, as the Smithsonian Museum explains.
And this is how the Wright brothers, by maneuvering their kite, discovered how to control an airplane
and roll.
It was one thing to build and fly a kite.
Quite another to fly a large glider with a person on board.
They had to figure out how to climb and descend which involves controlling the movement of
the center of pressure.
Lilienthal who died in the glider accident mentioned earlier, controlled his flight by
constantly shifting his body to adjust the centre of gravity but this was impractical
and dangerous.
The Wright brothers thought they could stabilize flight by mounting a horizontal wing-like
structure called an Elevator on the front of the wings.
Pressure on the Elevator would counteract the upward or downward movement of the aircraft.
Designing the shape of the wing was also important.
Although most wings had a perfect arc, the Wrights chose a different design.
They placed the highest point of the curve closer to the leading edge and made the depth
of the curve more shallow.
They believed this would reduce the movement of the center of pressure, making the aircraft
more stable and easier to control.
To test their glider, the Wrights headed to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a small fishing
village known for its strong winds
and ferocious mosquitos!
As Orville described: “They (mosquitoes) chewed us clear through our underwear and
socks.
Lumps began swelling up all over my body like hen’s eggs…Misery!
Misery!”
For all their hard work, their glider only produced about half the lift that they hoped
for.
Lift is the upward force that overcomes weight created by gravity in order to fly.
They had only spent $15 to build the glider - which is about $500 today.
They vowed to try again with a bigger glider.
The following year, in 1901, they returned to Kitty Hawk with a glider that was twice
the size of their original only to come away disappointed.
The larger glider performed worse than its predecessor because it had problems with control.
Wilbur felt so discouraged that he told Orville: “Not within a thousand years would man ever
fly.”
But history would prove otherwise.
Shortly after, leading French-American engineer, Octave Chanute, invited them to speak at the
prestigious organization Western Society of Engineers to talk about their recent experiments.
Wilbur spoke about the problems he and his brother encountered.
The speech was well-received and lifted their spirits.
Back to the drawing board they went.
The brothers suspected that their 1901 glider failed because the data they used for calculating
lift was inaccurate.
They questioned British engineer John Smeaton’s coefficient of air pressure which had remained
unchallenged for 150 years.
The brothers determined Smeaton’s value of 0.005 was incorrect and a value closer
to .0033 would be more accurate.
Lilienthal’s lift and drag coefficients relied on Smeaton’s data.
But this still didn’t account for all of the problems they had with their flights.
The Wrights used their trusty bicycles to test the accuracy of the data they had been
using.
They mounted a wheel to the handles of the bike and rode through the streets of Dayton
at various angles to obtain wind data.
Their bike tests showed a much lower value of lift than predicted by Lilienthal’s coefficients.
Turns out, Lilienthal’s table only applied to the specific wing shape he used in his
study.
The Wrights used wings with different aspect ratios.
To be sure their information was correct, the brothers decided to better control the
environment by building a wind tunnel.
The wind tunnel was fairly simple in design, consisting of a fan pushing a flow of air
through a box.
It kind of looked like a coffin, at six feet long.
But the crude appearance of the tunnel belied its sophistication.
It was so good that it set the standard for conducting aeronautical research to this day.
They tested 200 different wing shapes in their wind tunnel.
At the end of their tests, they had the most detailed data in the world for designing the
perfect aircraft wings.
In 1902, their new and improved glider performed dramatically better than their two previous
ones.
In this photo from September 23, 1902, Wilbur and Dan Tate, who helped with the glider experiments,
are launching Orville in the glider.
The 1902 glider allowed the Wright brothers to gain extensive experience in the air.
In September and October of 1902, they made between 700 to 1,000 flights!
Some even went as high as 600 feet or 183 meters.
Their success gave them the confidence and courage to try to invent a powered plane which
they had earlier dismissed as impossible to achieve in their lifetime.
Wilbur was so excited about their progress, he wrote:
“Our new machine is a very great improvement over anything…anyone has built.
Everything is so much more satisfactory that we now believe that the flying problem
is really nearing its solution.”
Their glider embodied the aerodynamic, control, and structural requirements needed for human
flight.
The only thing it lacked was a propulsion system to keep it flying.
In the summer of 1903, Orville and Wilbur were consumed with overcoming this final,
momentous hurdle.
The Wrights used a design inspired by their kite to create their first plane which they
called the “Flyer”.
To design their airplane, they used the data they gathered from their wind tunnel experiments.
They had to increase the wing area in order to carry the weight of an engine, propellers,
and additional structural reinforcements.
They built their own 12 horsepower engine as nobody that manufactured gasoline engines
could meet their power and weight requirements, or at least not for a reasonable price.
The engine’s job was to turn the two large propellers at the rear of the plane.
They drew on their knowledge of bicycles to connect the engine to the propellers using
what amounted to “bike” chains.
They returned to Kitty Hawk in September 1903, determined to fly their airplane.
But technical issues and poor weather made them doubt themselves.
The Flyer turned out to be 125 pounds heavier than they anticipated.
Fortunately, their propellers provided 50 percent more thrust than expected, which they
hoped would compensate for the extra weight.
Still, were they crazy to try to fly an airplane in 1903?
There was only one way to find out.
On December 14, 1903, the Wright brothers put their dream to the test.
They tossed a coin to determine which brother would make the first attempt.
Wilbur won.
The Flyer was only airborne for 3.5 seconds.
But nonetheless, it did ‘fly’.
Wilbur wrote confidently: “There is now no question of final success.”
Three days later, on December 17, with the Flyer repaired, they flew again.
Moments before the flight with Orville at the controls, a crewman observed an emotional
moment between the two brothers:
“After a while they shook hands, and we couldn’t help notice how they held on to
each other’s hand, sort o’like they hated to let go; like two folks parting who weren’t
sure they’d ever see each other again.
Wilbur came over to us and told us not to look sad, but to laugh and hollo and clap
our hands and try to cheer Orville up when he started.”
The Flyer lifted off - this time it stayed in the air for 12 seconds and 120 feet (37
m).
Still, it was progress.
They would fly four times that day.
The fourth and final attempt was the most significant, as the plane soared to 852 feet
(260 metres) lasting 59 seconds - proving the Flyer was capable of a sustained, controlled
flight.
After the flight, a gust of wind overturned the plane, severely damaging it.
The Flyer wouldn’t soar again.
But it didn’t matter - the Wright brothers had succeeded in doing what they set out to
do.
The brothers proclaimed: “…the age of the flying machine had come at last.”
But they hadn’t yet created a practical plane, one that could stay in the air for
a long period of time.
The 1903 flights were short and in a straight line.
They now had to prove they could fully control it by turning and flying longer distances.
Wilbur and Orville refined their design with two more planes in 1904 and 1905.
They got permission to fly by a local cow pasture just a few miles outside Dayton, called
Huffman Prairie, so they didn’t have to make the long trek to Kitty Hawk.
The owner didn’t charge them anything - he only requested they make sure the livestock
were out of the way before taking off - so as not to disturb or injure the poor cows!
On September 20, 1904, they flew their first complete circle.
The flight lasted 1 minute 36 seconds and covered over 4,000 feet.
By the fall of 1905, they routinely flew flights lasting several minutes.
In one instance, Wilbur circled a field 30 times in 39 minutes for a total distance of
24.5 miles or 39 km.
The Wright brothers actually waited until 1908 to share their invention with the world
- they made sure to receive their patent for the flying machine in America and several
European countries.
Wilbur first flew their airplane in public in France.
The French aviator Léon Delagrange summed up the superiority of the Wright machine,
saying simply: “Nous sommes battus.”
We are beaten.
The Wright brothers became the archetype of the “overnight success” story.
When the Wright brothers returned to America, they were greeted with much fanfare - including
a celebration in their hometown.
Actually, they preferred quietly getting back to work but just couldn’t escape the attention!
President William Howard Taft put it this way:
“You made this discovery by a course that we of America like to feel is distinctly American
- by keeping your nose right at the job until
you had accomplished what you had determined to do.”
They made headlines in the fall of 1909 when a million New Yorkers watched Wilbur pass
the NYC skyline during celebrations marking the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s
entry into New York Harbor.
World War One was the great force behind manufacturing aircraft.
Planes were certainly a step up from the balloons that the military used for observations during
the American Civil War.
In order to get a contract with the U.S. military, the Wright brothers needed to prove their
plane worked.
Unfortunately, one flight trial ended in tragedy.
On September 17, 1908, a propeller flew off the plane with Orville and passenger Lieutenant
Thomas Selfridge on board.
The plane was 75 feet in the air when it took a nosedive and crashed killing the Lieutenant
and seriously injuring Orville.
Lieutenant Selfridge was the first person to die in a powered plane.
The cause of the crash was a stress crack in the propeller.
The Wrights redesigned the Flyer to eliminate the flaw.
And later sold their Flyer to the Army for $30,000 - the equivalent of around $927,000
today.
The brothers formed the Wright Company in 1910 and began manufacturing a variety of
designs.
But Wilbur wouldn’t get much time to enjoy his success.
Two years later, in 1912, he died of typhoid.
He was only 45 years old.
His family believes overwork contributed to his death.
Wilbur had been tired and stressed from the lawsuits he and his brother filed for patent
infringement.
They believed the invention of the plane was their own and that they should be credited
and compensated for their contribution to the world.
It was apparently not only a matter of money but principle.
Tired and stressed from the burden of litigation, Wilbur contracted typhoid fever in April 1912
and died a month later.
His younger brother would live another 36 years.
Orville spent the last three decades of his life serving on boards and committees related
to aeronautics.
He died of a heart attack in 1948 at the age of 76.
The Wright brothers never married.
They were wed to their work.
To commemorate their unimaginable conquest, statues sprung up nearly everywhere the Wright
brothers had flown.
The inscription on the memorial at Kitty Hawk reads:
“Conceived by genius.
Achieved by dauntless resolution and unconquerable faith.”
As commercial aviation took off in the 1920s and thirties, the airplane became a symbol
of a new, modern age.
The impact of their invention is beyond measure.
And also inspired us to soar to the moon.
And now, the new dream to journey to Mars.
The Wright brothers were exceptional engineers.
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Thanks for watching.
For Newsthink, I’m Cindy Pom.