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DAYTON, Ohio, Jan. 30 -- Orville Wright, who with his brother, the late Wilbur Wright, invented the airplane, died here tonight at 10:40 in Miami Valley Hospital. He was 76 years old.
- Orville was a thrifty hipster. In modern-day Portland or Brooklyn, New York, Orville Wright would have fit right in. Aside from the bushy mustache, a 1909 photograph portrayed Orville as a sharp but simple dresser who wore “snappy argyle socks” with wingtips, at a time when the latter were replacing boots as the popular fashion.
- Some say Orville was on the autism spectrum. Both brothers possessed a singular determination and focus when it came to their pursuits, but neither enjoyed celebrity after becoming internationally famous.
- Orville and Wilbur didn’t care for dating. Katharine Wright, born three years to the day after Orville, was essentially the only female figure in Orville and Wilbur’s adult lives.
- He helped to launch the career of an African-American poet. While Wilbur was the entrepreneur behind first plane, Orville was the project’s engineering maestro.
WHEN OTTO LILIENTHAL, THE GERMAN WOULD-BE inventor of the airplane, died in a glider crash in 1896, the 24-year-old Orville Wright was incubating typhoid fever and about to enter a six-week delirium that would bring him near death.
Jan 30, 2019 · Wright died in his sleep at Miami Valley Hospital on Jan. 30, 1948, four days after suffering a heart attack at his laboratory on North Broadway Street.
- Printers and bike-makers
- Designing A Reliable Flyer
- Beyond Kitty Hawk
- Preserving Their Legacy
Before they made history, Wilbur and Orville were, in one sense, fairly unremarkable children. As the pair grew up in Dayton, Ohio, they weren’t immediate prodigies. “If you were a neighbor of the Wright brothers, say, when they were coming of age in the 1880s or so, you would have thought that these Wright boys aren’t really going anywhere,” Jakab...
The brothers’ pivot from ground to air transportation was likely driven largely by Wilbur. Even as they were producing bikes, Wilbur “was still casting around for something that he could work on to test his mettle,” Jakab says. “Aeronautics was a new technology that people were starting to make some progress on. So, he got interested in flight.” At...
Though the Wright brothers had made history, their airplane was essentially only a proof of concept. It could make straight-line flights, but the design didn’t yet have any practical use for society. Over the next couple of years, the partners refined their aircraft. In 1905, Wilbur flew a new-and-improved version for 39 minutes, completing 30 wide...
Orville “kept pretty much to himself for the rest of his life,” Jakab says. Uncomfortable with outsiders, he was never one to give speeches or thrive in the public eye. In fact, although Orville lived until 1948—nearly a century past the advent of sound recording, some 50 years after radio and 20 years beyond the first televisions—there is no known...
Orville was born to Milton and Susan Wright in Dayton, Ohio on August 19, 1871. Orville was the sixth child of seven, but two of his older siblings did not survive infancy. Those siblings that did survive were his 3 older brothers, Reuchlin, Lorin, and Wilbur, and he would have one younger sister, Katherine, born exactly three years after him in the very same room, in the family house in ...
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Wilbur died of typhoid fever in 1912—probably from drinking polluted water. Orville lived to be an old man and won many awards for his discoveries. He died in 1948.
