First in Flight: The Wright Brothers
Two Bicycle Mechanics Re-Invent Flight
In the book, The Published Writings of Wilbur and Orville Wright, Orville wrote in Century Magazine: In the field of aviation, there were two schools, powered flight or soaring flight. Our sympathies were with the latter school, partly, no doubt, from the extraordinary charm and enthusiasm with which the apostles of soaring flight set forth the beauties of sailing through the air on fixed wings, deriving the motive of power from the wind itself.
The boys devoured every book, newspaper clipping, and magazine article on flying and glider stories, engineering diagrams, and lift calculations. But when the brothers started designing and flying their own versions of published glider blueprints they found several flaws.
In Century Magazine, Wilbur writes: “We say that the calculations upon which all flying machines had been based were unreliable and that all were simply groping in the dark. Having set out with absolute faith in the existing scientific data, we were driven to doubt one thing after another, till finally, after two years of experiment, we cast it all aside, and decided to rely entirely upon our own investigations.”
Two bicycle mechanics who never attended college, or even obtained a high school diploma, would reinvent the science of aviation and aerodynamics on their own. As innovative as ever, they built a miniature wind tunnel in a spare room of their bike shop. And field-tested their designs on the wind-strewn beaches of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and the cow-dotted fields in Huffman Prairie, Ohio.
From the beginning, the brothers saw beyond “powered gliders” to envision practical aircraft that could carry passengers and achieved flight measured in hours and miles instead of minutes and feet. In this respect, they differed from all of their global competitors who were pursuing powered flight.
In a statement to the Associated Press, Orville wrote: From the beginning, the prime object was to devise a machine of practical utility, rather than a useless and extravagant toy. For this reason, the extreme lightness of construction has always been resolutely rejected. On the other hand, every effort has been made to increase the scientific efficiency of the wings and screws so that even heavily built machines may be carried with a moderate expenditure of power.
He goes on to say: The favorable results which have been obtained have been due to improvements in flying quality resulting from more scientific design and improved methods of balancing and steering. The motor and machinery possess no extraordinary qualities. The best dividends on the labor invested have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.
Their relentless testing, measuring, and testing again created features that would change aviation history: wing-warping to facilitate turning, an angled propeller to deliver speed, and an elliptical wing, with the fat side forward, to create lift.
The brothers had odd chemistry in their work relationship. Wilbur once wrote: After long arguments, we often found ourselves in the ludicrous position of each having been converted to the other’s side, with no more agreement than when the discussion began.
After their first, short-powered flight with the Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903, the brothers spent the next few years improving their design with the Wright Flyer II and Wright Flyer III, which became the world’s first practical airplane.
But there was a problem with their amazing, transformative invention. No one in the U.S., including the Army, was interested in their accomplishments. And, in France, the epicenter of the pursuit of flight and aviation knowledge, no one believed them. In a national Parisian paper, the question was asked of their claims “Are they Flyers or liars?”
