Wright, Wilbur 1867-1912 and Wright, Orville 1871-1948

WRIGHT, WILBUR 1867-1912 AND WRIGHT, ORVILLE 1871-1948

Pioneer aviators

The Bicycle Shop

Wilbur Wright was born on a farm in Indiana in 1867. His brother, Orville, was born in 1871, after the Wright family had moved to Dayton, Ohio. Their father was a bishop of the United Brethren in Christ and edited and published several church papers. The Wright brothers' first enterprise was a print shop, which they ran from 1889 until 1892, when they joined in the national obsession for bike riding and bought a bicycle shop. In 1895 they began to manufacture bicycles. The Wrights became interested in aeronautics in 1899 and immersed themselves in the available literature. From their analysis of a long line of failed attempts with heavier-than-air machines they concluded that the first step would be to master the principles of flight by observation and then by using gliders. Only then, they believed, could one think about combining an engine with the wing structure.

Kitty Hawk

Between 1899 and 1903 the brothers achieved a series of conceptual and technical breakthroughs that made flight possible. The first was the recognition in 1900 of the desirability of "wing-warping," the twisting of the wing tips (eventually by attaching wires to them) so that flight could be adjusted to changing air patterns without requiring the pilot to shift his weight. At the end of 1901 they determined that the published figures for the lift and drag coefficients required to design effective wings were wrong and built a wind tunnel to achieve the correct measurements. By the fall of 1902 they had built a new glider based on their discoveries, adding a rudder to control the aerodynamic effects of wing warping. They experimented with gliders each fall on the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where the winds were both powerful and constant, and there they made the first tests of a redesigned glider with a twelve-horsepower engine and propellers turned with bicycle chains. On 17 December 1903 the Wrights' plane flew—852 feet in fifty-nine seconds.

Wilbur in France

The brothers spent the next few years refining the Wright Flyer and unsuccessfully attempting to find a financial backer or to sell their machine to some government. Their 1908 model had a more powerful motor, together with control levers and seats for the pilot and one passenger. To pursue the best opportunities for commercial success, Wilbur departed for France, arriving in Paris on 29 May. On 8 August he flew before a select crowd at Le Mans, near Paris, and caused a sensation by his seemingly effortless flight with beautifully banked turns. The French pioneer aviators realized that they had been beaten by the Americans. On 21 December he won the Michelin Cup by completing a 77-mile flight in 2 hours, 20 minutes. Orders for flyers began to come in.

Breakthrough

In the summer of 1909 the brothers fulfilled a contract by submitting to a series of tests and performing demonstrations for the Army Signal Corps. The tests met the corps's specifications and resulted in the War Department's purchase of the U.S. Army's first airplane for $30,000. Additional orders would follow in the 1910s, as the military began to realize some of the potential uses in warfare of the Wrights' invention.

The Last Exhibition

In September 1909 Orville traveled to Germany where, at Temeplhof field in Berlin, as many as two hundred thousand people came to see him fly. On 18 September he broke his own endurance record for a two-man flight by flying for an hour and thirty-five minutes. On the same day he set an unofficial altitude record of 500 meters, more than twice the existing record of 155 meters. Meanwhile, Wilbur remained in the United States training officers to operate the Army Flyer.

The Battle with Curtiss

As the decade ended, the Wrights played out a classic patent war that had come to typify most of the extraordinary series of inventions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thomas Edison was challenged on the light bulb and had to prove his priority, as Henry Ford did over certain features of his early automobile models. Such litigation was only to be expected in view of the large numbers of inventors and entrepreneurs that such inventions attracted. The Wrights' problem was with Glenn Curtiss, a member of Alexander Graham Bell's Aerial Experiment Association. The Wrights alleged that the ailerons (movable flaps on the trailing edge of an airplane wing) of Curtiss's Golden Flier infringed the wing-warping concept described in their basic patent. The Wrights filed their suit on 18 August 1909. Wright v. Curtiss, later recognized as a classic patent case, was tried in New York on 14 and 15 December 1909 before a judge who had found against Henry Ford in a similar suit in 1900. (Henry Ford sided with Curtiss because he believed that overly broad patents, such as the one the Wrights held, stifled innovation.) The judge found for the Wrights, asserting that ailerons were the functional equivalent of the wing warp even though structurally dissimilar.

The Partnership Ends

On 28 May 1912 Wilbur died of typhoid fever. The brothers had been close friends and partners in all they did. Shortly before his death, Wilbur explained that "My brother Orville and myself lived together, played together, worked together, and in fact thought together." Orville continued in aviation as president of the Wright Company, which produced a succession of new models until 1915, when he sold the firm. He maintained a laboratory in Dayton and served as consulting engineer for a new aircraft company called Dayton Wright. He continued to be the elder statesman of American aviation until his death on 30 January 1948.

Sources:

Fred Howard, Wilbur and Orville: A Biography of the Wright Brothers (New York: Knopf, 1987);

Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908-1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).