Search results
The success of the 1903 Wright Flyer is perhaps one of the most iconic stories from American history. But how did Orville and Wilbur Wright end up as pioneering aeronautical engineers?
- Getting Under Way
- In Control
- First-Rate Performance
- Engineering The Age of Flight
NOVA: Two brothers running a bicycle shop seem an unlikely pair to take on the challenge of building a flying machine. How did they get into it?
Tom Crouch: At the end of the 19th century, Wilbur Wright was a young man looking for a challenge against which he could measure himself. He was taking it easy in life. He was approaching 30, living under his father's roof. He hadn't married, didn't have children. The only thing that he'd done in life was to run two very small businesses with the help of his younger brother Orville. I think he had the sense that, if he was ever going to make his mark in the world, this was the time to do it....
How did he begin tackling this challenge?
The first thing he did was to read everything he could lay his hands on, everything in sight. His father had some simple books on flight in nature in his library, and the Dayton Public Library had a handful of things on flight. When he had exhausted the local resources, Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution asking for more information on flight. Richard Rathbun, the assistant secretary of the Institution, sent him a handful of pamphlets and a list of additional books that he could purch...
What did he learn from this early research?
Well, if you think about an airplane, it really requires at least three separate systems to function. You have to have wings that will lift you into the air. You have to have a propulsion system that will move the wings through the air to generate lift. And you have to have a control system, a means of balancing the airplane when it's in the air. As he read the material he'd collected, Wilbur discovered that people had made wings that would lift. Otto Lilienthal had built gliders that carried...
How did he and Orville approach the problem?
The Wrights thought of flight as something that happened in three dimensions. A lot of other experimenters had thought about it as a two-dimensional sort of thing, as though an airplane were going to be a cart running on a road or a ship running on the sea. Basically, all the other individuals who were interested in the airplane at the turn of the century had thought about the notion of an inherently stable flying machine—a flying machine that would, if it were struck by a gust, return itself...
So how did they devise their control system?
If you think about an airplane moving through the air, it has to be controlled in three separate axes. To the Wrights, the notion of how to control the airplane in two of those axes wasn't so difficult. Ships had had rudders for millennia, and a rudder could be used to control the airplane in the yaw axis—nose right, nose left. The idea of an elevator, a rudder that sat horizontally on its side so that it could be used to control the airplane in pitch—nose up, nose down—didn't require any gre...
How did they crack that problem?
As Wilbur told the story, he was in the bicycle shop one day when a customer came in and purchased an inner tube. Wilbur was just idly fiddling with the inner-tube box in his hands when he realized that if you could create motion on the wings of a biplane so that the wing tip on one side was forced up while the other side was forced down, then you would have a means of controlling the airplane in lateral motion, in the roll motion. This technique—putting a twist of this sort all the way acros...
How did they go about moving from a kite to a glider that could carry their weight?
They began with an insistence that they calculate the performance of their machine before they built it. They were engineers, after all. To do that, there were certain factors that they knew. They knew what the wind speed was going to be. They knew what the weight of their machine was going to be. And they knew what the area of the wing of their machine was going to be. But there are two coefficients, small numbers, that you have to plug into the equation to describe the fluid in which you're...
Of what sort?
When the Wrights designed their first glider in 1900, they began with data that they had inherited from Otto Lilienthal. They assumed that since Lilienthal had flown rather well in his hang gliders, the data on which he had based those gliders must be correct. So they adopted a simple table of lift with changing angle of attack that he had put together. That was the basis for the design of their first two gliders in 1900 and 1901. But in experimenting with those gliders the Wright brothers di...
And was it?
It wasn't, as it turned out. In fact, the Wrights discovered that they had to set the cambered wing at three timesthe angle that their calculations said in order to balance the wheel. And that was simply confirmation of what they had discovered with the gliders. There was a problem with the information they were using to calculate performance—information that they had inherited from their predecessors.
The Wright brothers were discovering aspects of flight that no one had known before. Would you consider them engineers or scientists?
A scientist is primarily interested in uncovering some new truth about the universe, some new fact about the way in which the universe runs. Engineers build things. They build machines, they build bridges, they build buildings, they build systems. Their task is to design and build something that's going to work. That means that they're sometimes less concerned with uncovering absolute truth. They're gathering data that's going to help them to build more efficiently this thing that they're bui...
What does December 17, 1903, represent for you?
There aren't many days when history really changes, but December 17, 1903, was one of those days, because it was the day on which an airplane flew for the very first time, and the airplane's an invention that has shaped the history of the 20th century, from the way in which we do commerce to the way in which we fight our wars. It has absolutely shaped our time. It was an important day, of course, for Wilbur and Orville Wright. They knew that this would be the culmination of everything they'd...
Can you sum up what transpired that day at Kitty Hawk?
Well, they started out at 10:35 that morning with the first flight, which Orville made. It was quite short—120 feet, 12 seconds. After that Wilbur made the second flight, Orville the third. Wilbur's fourth flight, 852 feet in 59 seconds, really was something to celebrate. But it was cold, so once they had the airplane back, everybody but one guy who was detailed to hold the airplane down went into the shed to warm their hands. While they were in there, a gust came up and tumbled the airplane...
Nov 19, 2003 · Wilbur Wright had flown farther in 1905, but with few witnesses. Now he refused to compete against a man who he believed was stealing his ideas. It was a fatal mistake.
Jun 17, 2023 · Key Takeaways. On December 17th, 1903, the Wright brothers achieved the first powered flight, an accomplishment that is rightfully heralded as one of the greatest of all time. But for almost...
- Ross Pomeroy
May 28, 2024 · Wright brothers, American brothers, inventors, and aviation pioneers who achieved the first powered, sustained, and controlled airplane flight (1903). Orville made the first successful flight, covering 120 feet (36 meters) through the air in 12 seconds.
In this interview, Wright biographer and aeronautics historian Tom Crouch explains how a genius for engineering, a dogged perseverance, and an unflagging belief in the ultimate success of their...
People also ask
Why did the media ignore the Wright brothers' breakthrough flight?
Why were the Wright Brothers ignored?
Why did the Wright brothers succeed?
What happened to the Wright brothers?
Jul 30, 2020 · That two bicycle salesmen from Dayton, Ohio, were the first people to fly is as astonishing today as it was over a century ago, when the Wright brothers soared above slack-jawed crowds at public exhibitions in the United States and France.
