WRIGHT, WILBUR

(b.Miliville, Indiana, 16 April 1867; d. Dayton, Ohio, 30 May 1912)

and WRIGHT, ORVILLE

(b. Dayton, Ohio, 19 August 1871; d. Dayton. Ohio, 30 January 1948)

aeronautics

Wilbur and Orville Wright, the sons of Milton Wright, a bishop of the United Brethren Church, and Susan Catherine Koerner, had two older brothers, Reuchlin and Lorin, and a younger sister, Katharine. Their upbringing in a family where liberality of thought and individual initiative and expression were encouraged, contributed markedly to their later achievements. Although their formal education did not go beyond high school, they were widely read, especially in the technical literaics and smatterings of French and German. Both were of medium stature, trim, and athletic, and from boyhood showed powers of physical endurance and mechanical skill and ingenuity. After youthful ventures in editing and printing small Cycle Company in 1892 and for the next decade made their living by the design, manufacture, and sale of bicycles.

The death, on 10 August 1896, of German aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal, from injuries suffered in a gliding accident, led the Wrights to the serious study of flight. By 1899 they had carried their theory of lateral balance (aileron control) to the point of a practical demonstration made by Wilbur, in August, using a five-foot-span biplance kite. Equilibrium was maintained and maneuver made possible by varying the air pressures at the wing tips through adjustment of the angles of attack on the two sides. With this action and an adjustable horizontal surface (elevator), later (1902) combined with the compensating action of a movable vertical rudder, they achieved control about the threeaxes of the airplane. The system was patented in 1906 and has been used on all airplanes ever ever since.

Discovering–from field experiments and tentative gliding trials at kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in the summers of 1900 and 1901–that almost all existing aerodynamic datawere erroneous, the Wrights designed a small wind tunnel in which, in the fall of 1901, they tested several hundred model airfoils and obtained reliable lift and drag measurements as well as many other essential aerodynamic data.

With this knowledge, in October 1902 they began the construction of a powered of a powered airplane. The all-up weight, including pilot, was 750 pounds. The engine and propellers were of their own design and manufacture, and the propellers were based entirely on theories they originated. With this machine four successful fights were made from the level sand near the Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903. The final, longest flight lasted for fifty-nine seconds and covered a distance of 852 feet; this represented about half a mile through the air.

The Wrights devoted the next five years to improving both their invention and their skill as pilots. In 1905, with the airplane nearing the state of practical utility, they offered their patent and their scientific data to the United States War Department, which rejected the overture. Convinced that the first use of the airplane would be in war, the Wrights sought markets abroad. In 1908, after many rebuffs, they received purchase offers from a French syndicate and from the Unitted States government

Demonstration trials in the two countries took place concurrently, with Orville flying in the United States and Wilbur in France. All doubt of the Wrights’ mastery of the air evaporated, and the honors and adulation of two continents were heaped upon them. In 1909 Wilbur flew at Rome and Orvile at Berlin.

The culmination of the Wrights’ achievements came with Wilbur’s two flights at New York in 1909. On 29 September, taking off from and landing at Governors Island, he made a circuit of the Statue of Liberty; on 4 October he flew a twenty–one–mile course to Grant’s Tomb and back.

After their triumph the brothers quietly turned to teaching others to fly and to directing the Wright Company. They now had many imitators and rivals, and were forced to defend their pioneer patent in the courts. Under the strain. Wilbur contracted typhoid fever and died suddenly on 30 May 1912. Having divested himself of his interest in the Wright Company in 1915, Orville, after World War I. confined his aviation activities mainly to research, including membership in the National Advisory Committee for Aeronatics. He survived his brother by nearly thirty-six years. On the twenty-fifty anniversary of the first flight he witnessed the laying of the cornerstone of the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kill Devil Hills–the only United States national monument erected during the lifetiome of a man so honored.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The letters of the Wrights have been collected in Miracle at Kitty Hawk; the Letters of Wilbur and Orville Wright Fred C. Kelly, ed. (New York, 1951); their papers in The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, Including the Chanute–Wright Letters and Other Papers of Octave Chanute M. W. McFarland, ed., 2 vols. (New York-Toronto-London, 1953). Orville Wright wrote How We Invented the Aeroplane (New York,1953), Orvile Wright wrote How We Invented the Aeroplane (New York, 1953), edited with a commentary by F. C. Kelly. See also Wilbur Wright’s first rebuttal deposition contained in the complainant’s record in the case of Wright Company v Herring Curtiss Company and Glenn H. Curtiss, U.S. District Court, Western District of New York, 1912, vol. 1

A biography of the Wrights is F.C Kelly, The Wright Brothers: A Biography Authorized by Orville Wright (New York, 1943). See also C.H. Gibbs–Smith, The Invention of the Aeroplane (1799–1909) (New york, 1966); W. Langewiesche, “What the Wrights Really Invented,” in Harper’s Magazine200 (June 1950), 102–105; and M.W. McFarland, “When the Airplane Was a Military Secret: A study of National Attitudes Before 1914,” in U.S. Air Services39 (Sept. 1954), 11, bur Wright,” Ibid40 (Dec. 1955), 4–6.

Marvin W. McFarland

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).

Wright, Wilbur (1867–1912) and Orville (1871–1948) born, respectively in Indiana (near Millville) and Dayton, Ohio, the two brothers who invented the airplane in December 1903. Although they dated their interest in flight to 1878, when their father, Milton Wright, gave them a toy helicopter, they opened a printing business 1889 together and were moderately successful. In 1896, their interest in flight was renewed by the death of the German gliding pioneer Otto Lilienthal in a glider crash. After learning all they could about aeronautics and determining that Kitty Hawk, North Carolina had the best weather conditions for testing aircraft, in 1900 they began testing a kite/glider large enough to carry a human being aloft. Although their early experiments proved disappointing, the Wright brothers realized that the results of their experiments had to be traced to erroneous information they were using from their predecessors and set out to collect accurate information. They were finally successful in December 1903, and demonstrated that a heavier-than-air craft could take off from level ground and fly far enough to show that it was operating under a pilot's control. By October 1905, they were able to remain airborne for as long as thirty-nine minutes, but decided to suspend their experiments until they had secured patents for their invention. In 1908, the Wrights secured a U.S. Army contract for $25,000 to deliver the first airplane, and did so in 1909. Wilbur began to concentrate his energies on business and legal disputes. Returning exhausted to Dayton from a series of legal meetings and court appearances, he died in 1912, and Orville assumed the position of president of the Wright Company (founded in 1909). In 1915, Orville sold his shares in the company, and worked as an aeronautical engineer and consultant during World War I, and played a major role in the development of a pilotless aircraft bomb. After the war, he retired from the aircraft industry. In 1925, he loaned the 1903 Wright airplane to the London Science Museum, refusing to bring it back to the United States until the Smithsonian Institution accepted the Wright Brothers' claim that they had invented the first aircraft. The Smithsonian finally acceded to Orville's conditions in 1944.

Wilbur Wright see Wright Brothers .