KILL DEVIL HILLS, N.C. – Seconds before Orville Wright lay facedown on the ungainly device he called “the machine,” he reached out to his brother, Wilbur.

They “held onto each other’s hand, sort of like two folks parting who weren’t sure they’d ever see one another again,” an observer later recalled.

Then, the Wright Flyer – first dreamed of by Wilbur, crafted by the two brothers together and piloted by Orville – lurched into the air for 120 feet. The aviation age was born.

Everything had to be right for man to get off the ground on Dec. 17, 1903. Kitty Hawk, N.C., where the winds were strong and the sand soft, was the right place. Dayton, Ohio, where the Wrights lived, was the Silicon Valley of applied engineering in 1900 and the right place to design the world’s first airplane. The Wright Flyer was the perfect combination of control, lift and power.

But the greatest combination was the Wright brothers themselves – two high school dropout tinkerers whose strengths and weaknesses complimented each other perfectly.

“When one was about to give up, the other would come forth with a solution to the problem,” Marianne Hudec, Orville’s grandniece, said in a recent interview.

That may have been because the brothers had very different personalities, which their parents encouraged.

After his first day of kindergarten, Orville Wright skipped school every morning for a month. Instead, he and a friend would hide in a barn three houses away to take apart and re-assemble a sewing machine.

When his teacher told young Orville’s parents that he hadn’t been to school, they didn’t punish him. “They felt he was gainfully engaged,” Hudec recalled. It was the start of a lifelong love of tinkering.

Near the end of that life, Orville, a millionaire bachelor, would regularly try – and fail – to fix his own doorbell. “He would make a makeshift-fix or leave the pieces lying about and not finish it and let it sit, because he was bored by (the repair), not challenged by it,” recalled Hudec.

What was missing was Wilbur.

Wilbur Wright was the single-minded, self-trained engineer who sunk his teeth into technical challenges and just wouldn’t let go. He’d test, fiddle and test again, over and over, until he got a bike wheel or airplane wing to move the way he wanted.

Wilbur, who was born in 1867, took after his father, Milton Wright, a bishop in the United Brethren Church. Both were intense, well-read and stubborn. Wilbur was the brothers’ public face.

“People found Wilbur more impressive than Orville,” said senior Smithsonian Institution curator Tom Crouch, a Wright brothers biographer.

Orville, born in 1871, took after his mother, Susan. She was the shy daughter of a carriage-maker, who fixed appliances and made toys on the side.

“Orville’s personality was in his eyes,” Hudec said. “He had dancing eyes when he was up to something. His smile radiated in his eyes.”

While some would-be aviators had lifelong obsessions with flight, the Wright brothers were mainly intrigued by the technical problems of flight that had baffled others, Crouch said.

“They weren’t in love with the idea of flying,” Crouch said. “They were in love with the idea of solving the engineering problem. It’s what they lived for.”

In June 1903, Orville wrote to a friend: “Isn’t it astonishing that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so we could discover them!”

It’s hard to imagine more fertile soil for a tinkerer and an engineer than Dayton at the turn of the last century. In 1900, Dayton had more patents per capita than any other city in America. The cash register, the stepladder, the car self-starter and freon coolant systems were invented there.

In 1903, the Wright brothers needed to travel only a few blocks to get their airplane’s aluminum engine cast by a unique process that improved its performance while reducing its weight. The rest of the world didn’t learn of the Dayton foundry’s process until 1909, when it was described in scientific literature.

Initially, Wilbur planned to attend Yale, but he was hit in the head during a hockey accident. He stayed home, suffering from heart palpitations and depression. When he got better, he stayed home to nurse his dying mother. Eventually, he joined Orville in a printing business, publishing newspapers and printing outside work. They started with a press they built from scrap parts, including an old buggy top and four sticks of firewood.

Next, Orville and then Wilbur hopped on the new bicycle craze then sweeping the nation. They repaired and built bikes in their Wright Cycle Company shops.

Wilbur decided to take up the challenge of flight after reading of the death of gliding pioneer Otto Lillienthal in 1896. Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution for records of flight attempts by Lillienthal and others.

“I have been interested in the problem of mechanical and human flight ever since as a boy I constructed a number of (toy helicopters) of various sizes,” Wilbur explained in his letter. “My observations since have only convinced me more firmly that human flight is possible and practicable. It is only a question of knowledge and skill just as in all acrobatic feats.”

Three problems had to be solved: lift, power and control. Glider-oriented researchers, such as Lillienthal, worked on lift, basically getting off the ground. Others focused on power, trying to find the right engine.

The Wright brothers focused on control. Without control, a plane could crash suddenly, as Lillienthal’s glider did.

Wilbur figured out a key aspect of control by watching birds and noticing the way they tipped their wings. He couldn’t see how to emulate their subtle wing movements on a plane, however. Then one day, while talking to a customer in his bike shop, Wilbur absent-mindedly twisted the ends of an empty long thin box and realized he’d created a movable surface that resembled a bird’s wing. He’d found his solution.

Methodically, the Wrights tested their theories, starting with kites in Dayton in 1899. They moved up to human-carrying gliders in 1900, flying in Kitty Hawk for the wind and sand dunes into which to land their wheel-less plane. Like other innovators, they also craved privacy.

They were often discouraged. When the 1901 glider didn’t work well, the moody Wilbur turned to Orville and said, as Orville later wrote: “Not within a thousand years would man ever fly.”

Instead of giving up, the Wrights theorized that Lillienthal’s data on lift, which they had relied upon, was wrong. So they built their own wind tunnel – a wooden box 6 feet long, 16 inches square on the side, resting on two sawhorses – to test anew about 150 wing designs until they found the best one.

Now they were excited: “Wilbur and I could hardly wait for morning to come to get at something that interested us,” Orville later recalled, according to his niece’s memoirs. “That’s happiness!”

Their 1902 glider broke flight records, with Wilbur staying aloft for 622.5 feet in 26 seconds. Orville had second place with 615.5 feet and 21 seconds. Together, they glided daily, nearly 1,000 times.

They were ready to add power in 1903 with an engine built by their bike shop mechanic, Charles Taylor, an old friend and fellow high-school dropout. The Wrights had hired Taylor in 1901, for $16.50 a week, because they needed someone to tend to their bike business while plane-building consumed them.

By the time they left for Kitty Hawk on Sept. 23, 1903, the Wrights had spent $1,000 on their plane. That’s about $20,000 in current dollars.

On Dec. 14, when they were finally ready to fly, they flipped a coin to see who would go first. Wilbur won. When the plane started, it pitched up and crashed.

Wilbur, undaunted, wrote a letter home to his father and sister Katharine that night. “There is now no question of final success,” he wrote.

Repairs and bad weather meant the Wrights couldn’t try again until the morning of Dec. 17. There was ice on the ground and a 24-mph headwind ideal for take-off.

At 10:35 a.m. Orville lay on the plane’s bottom wing, face down, with his hips in a saddle that allowed him to move the plane’s wings. The plane started moving along the launching rail.

“The machine would rise suddenly to about 10 feet and then, as suddenly, on turning the rudder, dart for the ground,” Orville wrote in that day’s diary. “A sudden dart when out about 100 feet from the end of the track ended the flight. Time about 12 seconds.”

History was made. Orville flew a distance of 120 feet. That day, Orville flew twice and Wilbur flew twice, with Wilbur managing an impressive 59-second, 852-feet flight.

During a break, a gust of wind tossed and damaged the airplane beyond repair. The brothers threw it in a box and returned to Dayton. It was not reassembled until decades later.

The Wrights spent the next two years trying to perfect their plane design in tests outside Dayton. While they attracted some attention, their lone open-media flight was a disaster because of poor wind. Much of the world thought they were frauds and the Wrights retreated into secrecy.

In 1905, they built the first practical airplane. It could fly in circles and remain aloft for half an hour. After they perfected that plane, they didn’t fly for nearly three years, caught up in fighting for patent rights and business contracts.

The Wrights finally convinced the world of their success in two public flights in 1908 in Virginia and Paris. They were hailed as heroes. They opened a factory, the first airport and first flight school.

The pleasures of success didn’t last as long as their patent fights and lawsuits. Wilbur died in 1912, and Orville’s attention drifted while other airplane companies prospered.

“Everyone else is going right past them,” said Henry Narducci, a historian at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. “Orville is really a tinkerer. He’s driving people in the company nuts. … It’s clear by 1914, it’s over.”

Orville stopped flying by 1918 because of a bad back from a 1908 plane crash. He sold the company and kept experimenting until his death in 1948.

He earned his seventh and last patent for something he called Flips and Flops. It was a toy that sent toy clowns flying through the air from springboard to trapeze.

Web sites:

The Wright Brothers Collection at Wright State University, Dayton: www.libraries.wright.edu/special/wright-brothers/wbcoll.html

The Wright Brothers Collection of papers at the U.S. Library of Congress: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wrighthtml

The Smithsonian Institution’s Wright Brothers exhibit: www.nasm.si.edu/wrightbrothers

The Wright Brothers’ timeline: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wrighthtml/wrighttime.html

Dayton Aviation Heritage Park: www.nps.gov/daav/index.htm

Dayton Aviation Trail: http://aviationtrailinc.org/

Wright Brothers National Memorial: http://www.nps.gov/wrbr/

NASA’s Wright Brothers Web page: www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/Wright

Some selected writings from the Wright Brothers: www.wam.umd.edu/(TILDE)stwright/WrBr/Wright-articles.html

U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission’s Wright Brothers links: www.centennialofflight.gov/links/index.cfm

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