The Wright Brothers built this plane–and changed the world forever

Early on the morning of May 11, 1908, a trio of American reporters crept through the scrub-covered dunes near Kitty Hawk on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, slapping mosquitoes and hoping to catch a glimpse of the Wright brothers and their newest flying machine, preferably in the air. The brothers were known to be secretive about their work and had informed the reporters they wouldn’t fly if they knew the press was watching.

Taking care to stay out of sight, the reporters looked on from a distance as Orville and Wilbur Wright and a mechanic tinkered with their machine in its wooden hangar, then shifted it onto the monorail that served as its takeoff track. One of the brothers climbed into the pilot’s seat. The engine started with a clatter, and the plane’s two propellers began to turn, blades flashing in the sun.

A moment later, the fragile-looking biplane “rose obliquely in the air,” passing overhead “at the average speed of a railroad train,” reported Byron Newton of the New York Herald. The journalists watched, spellbound, as the aircraft dipped briefly behind a dune, then “sailed along over the surf, made another easy turn and dropped onto the sand about one hundred yards from the point of departure.”

Newton had traveled to North Carolina “a pronounced skeptic,” certain that the brothers were exaggerating their claims of flights up to 24 miles. Not anymore. “I believe all these things now and much more,” he wrote.

Now the brothers had to con­vince the rest of the world. A few months earlier, in February 1908, the Wrights had closed their first sale—to the U.S. Army Signal Corps, which they first approached in 1905. The Wrights had also signed a licensing deal with French investors who intended to sell manufacturing rights to companies in Europe. Both agree­ments, however, were contingent on successful demonstration flights—proof that the aircraft could meet benchmarks for speed, controllability, and range. The trials were scheduled for later that summer on both sides of the Atlantic.

The stakes were immeasurably high, for not only the Wrights but also the future of aviation. That April, Orville and Wilbur had come to Kitty Hawk to fine-tune their most advanced flying machine yet.

The moment marked a turning point in their careers. More than four years earlier, on December 17, 1903, amid the same windswept dunes, the Wrights had become the first men to successfully fly a powered, heavier-than-air machine. But if the brothers had made his­tory with their original Wright Flyer, they hoped to make money with this new model, the first Wright aircraft designed expressly for commercial production.

Aeronautical ambitions

In a sense, the brothers were returning to their roots as busi­nessmen. More than a decade earlier Wilbur and Orville began their careers as proprietors of a print shop in which they produced business cards, advertising flyers, and a couple of short-lived local newspapers. They then branched into bicycles, which they manufac­tured, sold, and repaired from the Wright Cycle Exchange on West Third Street in downtown Dayton, Ohio. The business turned a tidy profit, which they soon applied to one of the most daunting scientific challenges of the age. 

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The brothers later traced their interest in flight to a rubber band–powered toy helicopter given to them when they were children by their father, a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. Their curiosity was rekindled when they read that Otto Lilienthal, a German aeronautical pioneer, had died in a gliding accident in 1896. The news sent them to the local library in search of books on flight, some by ornithologists. In 1899 Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution to request any research papers it had published on aero­nautics and a list of other material in print in English. The brothers also read Lilienthal’s work, which proved the most influential. A mechanical engineer, Lilienthal was the first to build and success­fully fly manned gliders, and he wrote a seminal work on aeronau­tics, drawing partly on his study of birds, that stressed the importance of curved, or cambered, wings for generating lift. He also published a detailed table for calculating lift and drag for various wing shapes, which the Wrights used as a start­ing point, though they would later find many errors. 

Wilbur encountered Lilienthal's table in Progress in Flying Machines by Octave Chanute, a French Amer­ican civil engineer who pioneered design and flight experiments with manned gliders. In May 1900 Wilbur wrote to Chanute to introduce himself and seek advice, beginning a close friendship and collaboration that would last until Chanute’s death in 1910. 

But the most important collabo­ration, of course, was between the brothers themselves. Their talents were complementary. Wilbur was calm and cerebral, a formidable intellect who approached the challenge with scientific rigor. Orville—restless, energetic, insa­tiably curious—was a hands-on inventor who liked to tinker and experiment. Arguments that sometimes devolved into shouting matches were a kind of alchemy, yielding insights that neither could have reached alone.

Flying first

That productive blend of intellect and mechanical ingenuity soon produced a breakthrough, based on Wilbur’s observation that birds in flight twisted their wing tips to maintain control. The brothers thought the same concept could apply to an air­plane, by means of a mechanism that would warp the outer section of its wings. At Kitty Hawk in the fall of 1900, they tested the approach with a glider, flying it first as a kite before Wilbur made a series of manned flights of 300 to 400 feet. The following summer, they returned to Kitty Hawk with a larger glider but were frustrated by its poor performance. They real­ized they needed more data, having concluded that some of Lilien­thal’s calculations were incorrect. Back home in Dayton, they built a bicycle-wheel device to improve their understanding of lift and drag and a wind tunnel to test new wing shapes, applying that knowledge to the glider they brought to Kitty Hawk in the fall of 1902. 

Like its predecessor, the 1902 aircraft was built of spruce and ash, with muslin stretched over the wings, and constructed with the elevator to control pitch mounted in front of the wings, in a so-called canard configura­tion. But in other ways it was a big improvement. Rather than operate the wing-warping mechanism with his feet, as with the 1900 and 1901 gliders, the pilot of the 1902 craft lay prone in a cradle on the lower wing, shifting his hips to warp the wings. After two weeks of flight testing, the Wrights made a crucial modifica­tion, replacing the glider’s two fixed rudders with a single movable rudder to control yaw, or side-to-side motion. The rudder was linked to the wing-warping system, so that when the pilot initiated a turn by warping the wings, the rudder deflected in tandem, allowing for smooth, banked turns without skid­ding. The result was true three-axis control—an essential breakthrough that underpins modern aviation.

The new glider performed beau­tifully, skimming over the dunes for distances of more than 600 feet. All they needed now was an engine. After concluding that outside manufacturers were not up to the job, they enlisted their bicycle shop machinist, Charles Taylor, to help them build one.

He proved to be a brilliant choice. Like his employers, Taylor was a gifted engineer despite his lack of formal training. In just six weeks he had completed work on a four-cylinder, 12-horsepower engine that weighed only 152 pounds. The Wrights mated the engine to their newest model, the Wright Flyer.  

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Like the glider that preceded it, the Flyer was a canard design with three-axis control, but it was larger and designed for powered flight. Its engine was mounted on the lower wing; power was transmitted by chains to two counter-rotating propellers. As in the glider, the pilot flew from a prone position, but left of center to balance the weight, warping the wings with hip movements and controlling pitch with a hand lever. In the fall of 1903, the brothers returned to Kitty Hawk to find out if it would fly.  

Though it lasted just 12 seconds and covered only 120 feet, the Wright brothers’ first flight on December 17, 1903, was one of the most consequential moments in the history of invention, captured in the iconic photograph of Orville lifting off as Wilbur runs alongside in his trademark billed cap. It was the first of four success­ful flights that day; the last, with Wilbur at the controls, covered 859 feet and lasted 59 seconds.

It would be years before anyone outside the Wright family and a small circle of friends and associates grasped the enormity of what they had achieved. Within days, an account in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot claimed their machine had flown three miles—a wild exaggeration that few took seriously. The Wrights returned to Dayton to continue their work—if not in total secrecy, then at least beyond serious scrutiny from the press or anyone else.

Testing improvements

In some ways that suited them. Ever wary of rivals eager to appropriate their ideas, the brothers preferred to continue their flight tests in relative anonymity, though now they would do so at Huffman Prairie, an 84-acre cow pasture eight miles outside of Dayton. The owner let Wilbur and Orville use the site free of charge on the condition that they drive any horses and cows out of the pasture before flying. In the spring and summer of 1904, the brothers began experimenting with an improved machine, the Flyer II, and eventually built a catapult system to help get it airborne. Soon they were making flights of half a mile and experimenting with gentle turns. Then came the Flyer III—with a sturdier airframe, a bigger double rudder, and an improved engine—which they started flying in June of the following year.

After a disappointing start, including a smashup that left Orville badly bruised, the brothers made key modifications, enlarging the elevator and moving it farther forward for better pitch control. When they returned to the air in August 1905, it was clear that a threshold had been crossed. The improved Flyer III could fly circles. It could fly figure eights. It could remain aloft for extended periods, covering distances of nearly 25 miles. The brothers’ piloting skills were advancing just as rapidly. One September day, Orville clipped the top of a locust tree, breaking several branches, but he managed to recover and keep flying.

“They had done it,” writes Tom D. Crouch in The Bishop’s Boys, his magisterial history of the Wrights and their invention. “The 1905 Wright airplane was one of the most extraordinary machines in the history of technology. Capable of rising into the air, flying for an extended period under the complete control of the operator, and landing safely, it was the world’s first practical airplane.”

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A practical breakthrough

The press finally began to awaken from its slumber. The first comprehensive account of the brothers’ earlier flights had famously appeared in a beekeeping journal in January 1905. Other coverage followed, in the Dayton press and elsewhere, espe­cially after Wilbur circled the Huffman Prairie field 29 times that October, flying 24.5 miles and landing only because he ran out of gas. It was the last time either brother would fly for more than two years, as they turned their attention to selling their machine.

This proved challenging, not only because of lingering skepticism—“Fliers or Liars?” a New York Herald headline asked on February 10, 1906—but also because of the brothers’ own mis­steps. Their obsession with secrecy, particularly regarding the wing-warping system, made potential buyers wary. The Wrights began their negotiations by insisting that buyers sign a purchase contract before witnessing a flight or examining photographs and technical drawings.

Their caution was not entirely misplaced. A new crop of potential competitors, inspired partly by the Wright brothers, had emerged on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1907 Alexander Graham Bell, inven­tor of the telephone, founded the Aerial Experiment Association, a Canadian-American research group whose members included the motorcycle manufacturer and aviation enthusiast Glenn Curtiss. In Europe, Brazilian-born inventor Alberto Santos-Dumont flew his canard-style biplane 197 feet before a large crowd in Paris on October 23, 1906, winning a prize for the first “officially witnessed” flight of a powered, heavier-than-air machine in Europe. Many Brazilians today recognize Santos-Dumont as the first to fly because his aircraft took off unassisted, while the Wrights’ aircraft took off from a monorail track. Close on his heels was French engineer and businessman Louis Blériot, who on July 25, 1909, crossed the English Channel in a monoplane of his own design, a feat that made headlines around the world. 

Against that backdrop, the Wrights worried that each public demonstration offered competitors a chance to study, and perhaps copy, their all-important wing-warping system—precisely the charge they leveled against Curtiss when they sued him for patent infringement in 1909, a claim that was eventually upheld in court. At the same time, they wanted to sell airplanes. So they agreed that customers could with­hold payment until they were satisfied that their machines per­formed as advertised. Finally, in February 1908, the Army agreed to buy one of their machines for $25,000, contingent on successful flight tests. The licensing deal with the French syndicate, led by financier Lazare Weiller, closed in March.

By late April 1908 the Wrights were back at Kitty Hawk with a refurbished Flyer III. Among other improvements, it had been fit­ted with a more robust 35-horsepower engine and reconfigured to be flown from an upright seated position, with space for a passen­ger beside the pilot. Anticipating its use for flight instruction—as stipulated in their contract with the Signal Corps—the brothers had positioned the operating levers so the machine could be flow from either position. Aviation his­torians would later refer to the upgraded Flyer III as the Model A to distinguish it from subsequent Wright aircraft, though it’s unclear whether the Wrights themselves ever used that designation.

By any name, it was the Wrights’ most impressive airplane yet. A few days after the early morning flight witnessed by the reporters hiding in the dunes, Wilbur went aloft with a mechanic named Charles Furnas—the world’s first airplane passenger. The tests were cut short that afternoon, when Wilbur pushed a lever the wrong way and dove into the ground, splintering the machine. He was not seriously injured, though, and the Wrights shrugged off the crash. They salvaged what parts they could and went their separate ways—Wilbur to France, where he would reunite with a new machine that had been shipped from Dayton, and Orville to Dayton to complete work on the aircraft he would demonstrate for the Army a few months hence. “From their perspective, they had completed their experimental work, their research and development work,” says Peter Jakab, a former chief curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. “It’s the airplane that incorporates all the refinements that made it a practical airplane in 1905.”

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Public displays

Wilbur’s demonstration flights at the Hunaudières racecourse near Le Mans, about 125 miles from Paris, that August and September were triumphs. Spectators watched in awe as he swooped confidently into turns, guiding his plane with subtle wrist movements and leaving no doubt that the Wrights had mastered powered flight. “Nous sommes battu—We are beaten,” conceded French aviator Léon Delagrange, after watching Wilbur trace a perfect series of figure eights. Monarchs and politicians from around the continent bombarded Wilbur with congratulations.

On a more prosaic note, Weiller, the head of the French syndicate that had insisted on the demonstration flights, agreed in early October that the Wrights had fulfilled the conditions of their contract, launching the Model A on its path to commercial production. Crouch, an aeronautical historian, estimates that the French firm, acting as a sales agent for manufacturers, subsequently received orders for about 25 Wright airplanes. A few dozen more were made in Germany and the United Kingdom under separate licensing agreements.

Orville had a much tougher go of it. Starting in early September 1908, he began demonstrating his machine before large crowds at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. Things went smoothly at first. On September 9, Orville set a new endurance record of 62 minutes, 15 seconds, then made his first public flight with a passenger, Lt. Frank Lahm. But eight days later, tragedy struck. As Orville circled the field with a passenger, Lt. Thomas E. Self­ridge, a propeller came loose and damaged the rudder, causing Orville to lose control. The plane plummeted to the ground. The men were pulled unconscious from the wreckage. Selfridge, his skull fractured, died within a few hours, the first man in history killed in an airplane accident.

Orville spent weeks in the hospital recovering from a broken leg and hip, four broken ribs, and back injuries that would plague him for the rest of his life. Flight tests resumed with an improved version of the Model A—soon to be known as the Wright Military Flyer—the following summer, this time with far better results. On July 27, 1909, Orville passed the Army’s endurance bench­mark and broke the records for time and length of flight, carrying Lieutenant Lahm for one hour, 12 minutes, and 40 seconds, a feat that was witnessed by President William Howard Taft. A few days later, before a large crowd that again included President Taft, Orville passed the speed test with Lt. Benjamin D. Foulois in the passenger seat, making a 10-mile round-trip flight from Fort Myer, Arlington, to Shuter’s Hill, Alexandria, in 14 minutes and 42 seconds at an average pace of 42.583 miles an hour—faster than the Army’s requirement of 40 miles an hour.

With its performance standards met, the Signal Corps agreed to purchase the aircraft for $30,000. The sum included a $5,000 bonus for exceeding the Army’s speed benchmark. On August 2, 1909, the modified Model A was for­mally inducted into the Army as Signal Corps No. 1. The Army added wheeled landing gear and operated the plane until 1911, when the wheels were removed and the plane was turned over to the Smithsonian. It is now displayed at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.