Wright Cycle Shop, Dayton 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Wilbur Wright 

Orville Wright 

The Wright Brothers

Wilbur and Orville were the sons of Milton and Susan Wright. Milton was a bishop in the United Brethren Church, and was often away from home on church business. But he wrote hundreds of letters home, and often brought back presents from his trips, exposing his children to the world beyond their horizon. In 1878, he brought home a rubber band-powered helicopter, and young Wilbur and Orville began to build copies of it.

In 1884, Bishop Wright moved his family to Dayton, Ohio, the political center of the United Brethren Church. About the same time, his wife Susan fell ill with tuberculosis. Wilbur, just out of high school, put off college and nursed his sick mother. Orville began to lose interest in school and learned the printing business. Susan Wright died in the summer of 1889, the same year that Orville dropped out of high school to open his own print shop.

In 1890, Wilbur joined Orville in the printing business, serving as editor for The West Side News, a weekly newspaper for their west Dayton neighborhood. It was modestly successful, and the Brothers began a daily, the Evening Item, in 1891. However, they couldn't compete with larger, more established daily newspapers, and after a few months they went back to being simple job printers.

In 1894, Wilbur and Orville were caught up in the bicycling craze that swept the nation. To augment the income from their printing trade, they began repairing and selling bicycles. This soon grew into a full-time business, and in 1896 they began to manufacture their own bikes. The Wright Cycle Company returned a handsome profit, but the brothers cared little about the money. They were already thinking about trading their wheels for wings. Milton and Susan Wright had taught their children to take pleasure from intellectual challenge, and without them knowing it, this had become the driving force in Wilbur and Orville’s lives. Their early careers reflect this. After they learned the skills required to become printers, they moved on to the problems of building printing presses, running newspapers, repairing bicycles, and building them, all in rapid succession. In short, they loved to learn and once they had learned to build bicycles, they began looking for something new. The next logical challenge had already been anticipated by several visionaries who noted that the obstacles to human flight were similar to those faced by cyclists. Among them was James Howard Means, who wrote in his journal The Aeronautical Annual in 1896, "It is not uncommon for the cyclist, in the first flash of enthusiasm which quickly follows the unpleasantness of taming the steel steed, to remark: ‘Wheeling is just like flying!’"

In 1896, the newspapers were filled with accounts of flying machines. Wilbur and Orville noticed that all these primitive aircraft lacked suitable controls. They began to wonder how a pilot might balance an aircraft in the air, just as a cyclist balances his bicycle on the road. In 1899, Wilbur devised a simple system that twisted or "warped" the wings of a biplane, causing it to roll right or left. They tested this system in a kite, then in a series of gliders.

They made their first test flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on the shores of the Atlantic where the strong winds helped to launch the gliders and the soft sands helped to cushion the fall when they crashed. Their first two gliders, flown in 1900 and 1901, failed to perform as the Wrights had hoped. The gliders did not provide enough lift nor were they fully controllable. So, during the winter of 1901-1902, Wilbur and Orville built a wind tunnel and conducted experiments to determine the best wing shape for an airplane. This enabled them to build a glider with sufficient lift, and concentrate on the problem of control. Toward the end of the 1902 flying season, their third glider became the first fully controllable aircraft, with roll, pitch, and yaw controls.

The first flight, December 17, 1903

During the winter of 1902-1903, with the help of their mechanic, Charlie Taylor, the Wrights designed and built a gasoline engine light enough and powerful enough to propel an airplane. They also designed the first true airplane propellers and built a new, powered aircraft. Back in Kitty Hawk, they suddenly found themselves in a race. Samuel P. Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, had also built a powered aircraft, patterned after a small, unmanned "aerodrome" he had flown successfully in 1896. To add to their frustrations, the Wrights were delayed by problems with their propeller shafts and the weather, giving Langley time to test his aircraft twice in late 1903. Both attempts failed miserably, however, and Langley left the field to the Wrights. On December 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright made the first sustained, controlled flights in a powered aircraft.

Back in Dayton, Ohio, the brothers found they had much to do to perfect their invention. While the 1903 Wright Flyer did indeed fly, it was underpowered and difficult to control. They established the world's first test flight facilities at Huffman Prairie, northeast of Dayton (today, the site of Wright Patterson Air Force Base). For two years they made flight after flight, fine tuning the controls, engine, propellers, and configuration of their airplane. At first, they could only fly in a straight line for less than a minute. But, by the end of 1905, they were flying figure-eights over Huffman Prairie, staying aloft for over half an hour, or until their fuel ran out. The 1905 Wright Flyer was the world's first practical airplane.

Johnny Moore cried the news to the folks of Kitty Hawk, "They done it! They done it! Damned if they ain't flew." The Wrights themselves were more sedate and in better possession of their grammar. They ate a quiet lunch, then walked to the Kitty Hawk Weather Bureau to send a telegram home to Dayton.

"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. OREVELLE WRIGHT"

After the 1905 flying season, the Wrights contacted the United States War Department, as well as governments and individuals in England, France, Germany, and Russia, offering to sell a flying machine. They were turned down time and time again - government bureaucrats thought they were crackpots, while others thought that if two bicycle mechanics could build a successful airplane, they could do it themselves.  However, the Wright persisted, and in late 1907,  the U.S. Army Signal Corps asked for an aircraft. Just a few months later, in early 1908, a French syndicate of businessmen agreed to purchase another. Both the U.S. Army and the French asked for an airplane capable of carrying a passenger. The Wright brothers hastily adapted their 1905 Flyer with two seats and a more powerful engine. They tested these modifications in secret, back at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina for the first time in several years. Then the brothers parted temporarily - Wilbur to France and Orville to Virginia.

Replica of the original 1909 Military Flier -
USAF Museum, Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, Ohio

In 1908 and 1909, Wilbur demonstrated Wright aircraft in Europe, and Orville flew in Fort Meyer, Virginia. The flights went well until Orville lost a propeller and crashed, breaking his leg and killing his passenger Lt. Thomas Selfridge. While Orville recuperated, Wilbur kept flying in France, breaking record after record. Orville and his sister Kate eventually joined Wilbur in France, and the three returned home to Dayton to a elaborate homecoming celebration. Together, Orville and Wilbur returned to Fort Meyer with a new Military Flyer and completed the U.S. Army trials. A few months later, Wilbur flew before over a million spectators in New York Harbor - his first public flight in his native land. All of these flights stunned and captivated the world, and the Wright Brothers became the first great celebrities of the twentieth century.

The purchase of the world's first military aircraft might have been big news, but it was overshadowed by news from Europe. Just five days before Orville flew the speed trial at Fort Meyer, Louis Bleriot had risen early in the morning at his seaside camp near Calais, France and decided it would be a good day to fly to England.

Replica of Berliot's Monoplane, built by Mr. Ernest C. Hall (Ohio Director of Aeronautics prior to WW II) of Warren, Ohio in 1911 from factory drawings. In it, he taught himself to fly. Mr. Hall donated the aircraft to the USAF Museum, Dayton in 1969.

In October of 1908, Lord Northcliffe, the publisher of London's Daily Mail, had announced a $5000 prize to the first pilot to fly an airplane across the English Channel. He had expected Wilbur Wright to try for the prize, but Wilbur declined to risk his one and only airplane on a flight across water. The prize went unclaimed until July of 1909 when three European aviators showed up at Calais to attempt the crossing. Hubert Latham was first off the ground, taking off in his Antoinette monoplane on July 19. But seven miles out, the engine quit and Latham had to be fished out of the sea. Count Charles De Lambert never got a start. He wrecked his Wright biplane on a test flight and withdrew from the race.

By rights, Louis Bleriot should never have been there at all. He could barely walk, having burned his foot on the exhaust pipe of the Anzani engine that powered his latest flying machine, the Bleriot XI. He was also out of money, having spent his own fortune and his wife's dowry - some 780,000 francs - on aerial experiments and was bankrupt. But on July 1, his wife was visiting well-to-do friends in Paris and happened to save their child from a fatal fall. In gratitude, the friends offered to finance Bleriot's channel flight.

On the night of July 24, the high winds that usually scoured the channel began to slacken. Latham sent word to his crew chief to wake him at 3:30 a.m. if the weather continued to improve. By 2:00 a.m. the air was calm and the sky clear. The Bleriot camp came alive  when the mechanic ran around firing his revolver to wake everyone. The plane was wheeled out, the engine warmed up, and Bleriot made a test flight. He studied the Latham camp through his binoculars - no one was stirring. At 4:41 a.m., Louis Bleriot took off and steered his airplane toward England.

The weather remained clear and calm, and the aircraft engine continued to turn faithfully. After twenty minutes, Bleriout could see the thin dark line that was the coast of England, but there were no white cliffs! Without any instruments aboard - not even a compass - Bleriot had drifted too far to the north, past Dover. He spied three small ships that seemed to be making for a port and decided to follow them. They pointed him towards his destination and before long he was skirting the towering chalk-white cliffs, looking for an opening and a landing field. As he flew, the wind began to freshen and tossed his airplane like a child's toy. "The wind was fighting me now worse then ever," Bleriot later recalled. "Suddenly at the edge of an opening that suddenly appeared in the cliff, I saw a man desperately waving a tricolor flag, out along in the middle of a field, shouting 'Bravo! Bravo!' I flung myself toward the ground." The man who had signaled him from the ground, French newsman Charles Fontaine, wrapped Bleriot in the French flag and kissed him soundly on both cheeks.

"And Latham?" Bleriot asked Fontaine. Latham was still in France. No one had roused him until the sound of Bleriot's plane brought his camp to life. There was a furry of activity as he struggled to catch Bleriot, but by the time the Antoinette was ready, strong winds and dangerous gusts had sprung up. It was too late. When word came of Bleriot's safe landing, Latham sent a short telegram, "Cordial Congratulations. Hope to follow you soon."

The effect of Bleriot's flight was out of proportion for the distance traversed. Europe seemed to go wild, and Bleriot was front page news for days afterwards. The Wrights and other pilots had flown much further than the 24 miles that Bleriot had covered, and had remained aloft far longer than the 37 minutes it took him to fly that distance. But none of them had crossed a natural boundary with such profound implications as the English Channel. As author H.G. Well put it, "England is no longer, from a military point of view, an inaccessible island." It was as if that single flight had suddenly redrawn the map of the world.

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