From the dawn of our species, humans have yearned to fly. As Wilbur Wright once wrote:
“The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their gruelling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air.”
Unsurprisingly, the first attempts at conquering this “infinite highway” involved directly copying the flight of birds. History abounds with tales of daredevils who strapped on wings made of wood, canvas, or feathers and leaped from towers, bridges, and other tall structures – with often fatal results. Others – most famously O.G. renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci – conceived of more elaborate flapping-wing flying machines known as ornithopters. But these early dreamers not only failed to understand key facets of how birds’ wings generate lift, but also that human bodies are just not built for flapping-wing flight. While birds have hollow bones and highly-efficient respiration systems, humans are just too heavy – and our muscles much too weak – to achieve the power-to-weight ratios needed to achieve flight. If we humans were to take to the skies, we would have to do so in our own unique way. The development of hot air and hydrogen balloons in the late 18th century and dirigibles in the late 19th gave humanity its first taste of flight, but these craft were severely limited, being highly vulnerable to the whims of wind and weather – and to learn more about people took the first balloons and and immediately turned them into weapons of war (because of course they did) please check out our previous video The Fascinating Tale of the World’s First Air Force. The true conquest of the air would have to await the development of practical heavier-than-air flying machines – AKA aeroplanes.
By the end of the 19th century, scientists and engineers had realized that for manned, heavier-than-air flight to become a practical reality, three major technical obstacles had to be overcome. First, the aerodynamics of lift generation had to be understood, and the most efficient shapes for wings worked out. Second, a means of controlling an aircraft along all three axes of movement – yaw, pitch, and roll – had to be devised. And finally, an engine lightweight yet powerful enough to lift itself, an aircraft, and its pilot into the air had to be developed. But exactly how these goals were to be achieved – and in what order – varied greatly from inventor to inventor, with some advocating a measured, incremental approach and others a brute force methodology.
Among the first modern aviation pioneers to achieve a degree of success was French engineer Clément Ader. Born near Toulouse in 1841, Ader [“A-day”] was a renowned electrical engineer and sportsman and one of the major pioneers of telephone technology and the sport of cycling. Long fascinated by flight, in 1873 Ader built a large bird-shaped kite covered in goose feathers, which he tethered to the ground and lay atop in order to ride the wind. Convinced that powered heavier-than-air flight was possible, in 1882 Ader began construction of an aircraft he dubbed Éole – the French form of the Greco-Roman god of the wind, Aeolus. Completed in 1890, Éole resembled a giant bat, with highly-curved wings 14 metres long and no elevators, rudder, or tail surfaces at all. Instead, a complicated mechanism allowed the wings to be swung and pivoted in any direction, imitating the control methods used by birds. Weighing only 330kg including its pilot, the craft was powered by a lightweight 20 horsepower steam engine of Ader’s own design, fuelled by alcohol.
On October 9, 1890, Ader transported the Éole to an estate in Armainvilliers for its maiden flight test. As a handful of assistants looked on, the strange-looking craft, piloted by its inventor, sputtered its way across the open field, slowly gaining speed. Suddenly, it rose up and skimmed along the ground at an altitude of around eight inches. By the time Éole touched down, it had travelled around 50 metres through the air. Despite this very modest achievement, Ader was ecstatic, triumphantly declaring that “I have resolved the problem [of flight] after much work, fatigue, and money,” and claiming that only the length of the field had prevented a longer flight.
Meanwhile, the French Ministry of War took great interest in Ader’s experiments, and in 1892 supplied him with 650,000 Francs to develop a more sophisticated flying machine. Completed five years later, the aircraft, dubbed Avion III, had two engines each driving its own propeller, a longer 16-metre wingspan, and a rudder for lateral control. On October 12, 1897, Ader organized a series of demonstrations for the Army at a field near Versailles. At first Ader merely conducted taxi trials, getting a feel for the machine, but two days later he finally attempted to get into the air. Unfortunately, during the takeoff run a gust of wind caught the machine and blew it sharply sideways, nearly causing it to tip over. The Army was unimpressed and immediately cut off Ader’s funding. Though he would remain a passionate advocate for aviation, writing a book on the subject and even predicting the development of the aircraft carrier, Ader never built another aircraft. However, after Brazilian-born aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont made what is considered Europe’s first powered, heavier-than-air flight on October 23, 1906, Ader began to inflate his accomplishments, claiming that Éole had flown twice as far as is officially recorded and that Avion III had flown for nearly 1,000 feet. As the Army’s official report on Avion III had never been published, Ader was able to track down the surviving witnesses and convince them to keep quiet about what they had seen. As a result, Ader is today considered one of France’s great aviation pioneers, alongside Santos-Dumont, Louis Breguet, and others. Aircraft manufacturer Airbus even named one of its factories in Toulouse after him. And if you think that’s dishonest and petty, there is a lot more of that to come in this story.
The next major figure to tackle the problem of heavier-than-air flight was none other than Sir Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the first practical machine gun and the man who changed the face of modern warfare forever – and for more on this fascinating story, please check out our video Who Actually Invented the First Machine Gun? on our sister channel Origins. Born in Sangerville, Maine in 1940, Maxim had been fascinated by flight from an early age. When he was sixteen, his father came up with a remarkably advanced design for a helicopter, but did not pursue the project as there were no engines light and powerful enough to power it. In 1881, after successfully selling his revolutionary machine gun to the British army, Maxim decided to settle in England and become a British citizen, renting a manor called Baldwyn’s Park in Kent. At this same time, he also decided to indulge his lifelong fascination and have a go at finally cracking powered flight.
Like most aviation theorists of the time, Maxim was convinced that there was little to be gained from studying the flight of birds, writing in 1892 that:
“It is neither necessary nor practical to imitate the bird too closely, because screw propellers have been found to be very efficient…without doubt, the motor is the chief thing to be considered. Scientists have long said, Give us a motor and we will very soon give you a successful flying machine.”
At first, Maxim pursued an incremental, laboratory-based research program, testing various airfoil sections to determine their lift-to-drag ratio and find the most efficient shape. To move these sections through the air, Maxim constructed a machine called a whirling arm, first developed in the early 18th century by British mathematician Benjamin Robins. Befitting his nature as a “go big or go home” type inventor, Maxim’s whirling arm was a massive construction, measuring 20 metres in diameter. Interestingly, Maxim would later develop this contraption into a popular carnival ride called the “Captive Flying Machine” – one of which still operates to this day at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Maxim’s whirling arm would also form the basis for later human centrifuges used to test the reaction of bodies to high accelerations.
Eventually, Maxim switched to using a more practical wind tunnel, in which air is driven past a stationary test article rather than the other way around. But this being Maxim, the tunnel was enormous, measuring four metres long and one metre to a side and capable of generating wind speeds of up to 80 kilometres per hour. In addition to developing some very efficient airfoil sections, Maxim was also among the first to discover that the total aerodynamic drag on a structure is often higher than the sum of the individual drag contributions of its components. He further noticed that some of this additional drag – now known as interference drag – was caused by the airflow streams of closely spaced components interacting with each other.
But Maxim’s patience could not long stand this kind of slow, methodical research, and in 1893 he threw his enormous resources into building an absolute monster of a flying machine. Weighing four tons and measuring 60 metres long with a wingspan of 32 metres, the aircraft was powered by two 180-horsepower steam engines driving 5-metre-diameter propellers. Though the machine was fitted with large elevators fore and aft and upward-tilted or dihedral wingtips for roll stability, it had no rudder for it was never intended to fly freely. Indeed, the aircraft was designed to roll along a 550-metre-long metal test track, which featured another set of wooden guard rails along either side. If the craft succeeded in becoming airborne, outriggers on the fuselage would contact these rails and stop the vehicle from rising any higher. At this point in his research, Maxim was only interested in developing engines powerful enough and wings efficient enough to lift his craft into the air; achieving directional control was a problem for another time.
When fully powered up, Maxim’s behemoth was truly a sight to behold. As journalist H.J.W Dam wrote of one test run in 1893:
“A rope was pulled, the machine shot forward like a railway train, and, with the big wheels whirling, the steam hissing, and the waste pipes puffing and gurgling, flew over the eighteen hundred feet of track in much less time than it takes to tell it.”
Unfortunately for Maxim, these trials came to an abrupt end on July 31, 1894 when, having travelled 600 feet and reached a speed of 67 kilometres per hour, the flying machine rose up sharply against the guardrails and caused them to snap. For a few moments the machine flew freely through the air, until suddenly a piece of guardrail smashed into one of the propellers, forcing Maxim to cut power to the engines. While his giant contraption made a safe landing, Maxim abandoned his research soon after. Like many of his contemporaries, Maxim realized that steam power was a dead end, for the technology simply could not achieve the power-to-weight ratios needed to achieve flight. The answer, he believed, lay in the internal combustion engine, developed by inventors like Jean Lenoir and Nicolaus Otto in the 1860s. Even by the 1890s, however, such engines were still too heavy and inefficient for the task, but Maxim was confident the technology would advance rapidly, writing in 1893 that:
“Even under the most unfavourable circumstances, aerial navigation will be an accomplished fact inside of ten years.”
Maxim would live long enough to see just how accurate his prediction was.
But while Ader, Maxim, and many other aviation pioneers tried to brute-force their way into the air – directional guidance be damned – others took the opposite approach, believing the key to practical heavier-than-air flight lay in developing a stable, controllable glider which could later be fitted with an engine. And among the greatest advocates of this approach was German experimenter Otto Lilienthal, known worldwide as the “flying man.”
Born in 1848 in Anklam in the Kingdom of Prussia, Lilienthal and his brother Gustav began their aeronautical experiments at a young age, building a set of strap-on wings from birch veneer. Though the contraption failed to get off the ground, the brothers never lost their fascination with flight; indeed, during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, soldiers in Otto’s army unit reported that he spoke of little else. After the war, he formed his own engineering company producing steam engines, boilers, and other machinery, while in the late 1880s he embarked the research that would make him world-famous: uncovering the secrets of stable, controlled flight.
Lilienthal began by studying birds and conducting airfoil studies using a whirling-arm machine. The result was the 1889 book Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation, which, to the benefit of many other experimenters, contained extensive, detailed tables listing the lift-to-drag ratio of various airfoil profiles. But Lilienthal was not satisfied with laboratory experiments, believing that:
“One can gain a proper insight into the practice of flying only by actual flying experiments. The inner in which we have to eat the irregularities of the wind, when soaring in the air, can only be learned by being in the air itself.”
To this end, in 1891 Lilienthal thus began constructing a series of bird-like gliders, built of wood, bamboo, canvas and tensioned wire. Lilienthal stood in a circular cockpit, gripping a support bar, and flew the gliders by acrobatically swinging his body around to the craft’s centre of gravity. These experiments started small, with Lilienthal later writing:
“The first attempts were made from a grass plot in my own garden upon which, at a height of one meter from the ground, I had erected a springboard, from which the leap with my sailing apparatus gave me an oblique descent through the air. After several hundred of these leaps I gradually increased the height of my board to 2.5 metres, and fro that elevation I could safely and without danger cross the entire grass plot.”
By 1893 Lilienthal had so refined his glider designs that he began producing a standardized, patented version called the Lilienthal Normalsegelapparat or “Standard Flying Apparatus” for commercial sale. Nine examples were sold, making it the first aircraft in history to be serially produced. In 1894, Lilienthal built an artificial hill near his house, topped by a wooden hangar to store his gliders. Jumping from this hill, which provided its own updraft, he was able to achieve flights of up to 45 metres. Later that year, he moved his experiments to the Rhinow Hills northwest of Berlin, where his flights increased to an unheard-of 250 metres. As his flying prowess increased, Lilienthal became convinced that his hands-on approach held the key to developing practical heavier-than-air flight, writing:
“No one can realize how substantial the air is until he feels its supporting power beneath him. It inspires confidence at once.”
Lilienthal’s flights, always performed on Sundays, became known around the world, with scientists, politicians, and luminaries of all kinds travelling to the Rhinow Hills to witness them. In 1896, reporter R.W. Wood of the Boston Evening Transcript described one of these flights:
“[Lilienthal] faced the wind and stood like an athlete waiting for the starting pistol. Presently the breeze freshened; he took three rapid steps forward and was instantly lifted from the ground, sailing off nearly horizontally from the summit. He went over my head at a terrific pace, at an elevation of about 50 feet, the wind playing wild tunes on the tense cordage of the machine, and was past me before I had time to train the camera on him.
…[Then] the apparatus tipped sideways as if a sudden gust had got under the left wing. For a moment I could see the top of the aeroplane, and then with a powerful throw of his legs he brought machine once more on an even keel, and sailed away below me across the fields at the bottom, kicking at the tops of haycocks as he passed over them. When within a foot of the ground he threw his legs forward, and notwithstanding its great velocity the machine stopped instantly, its front turning up, allowing the wind to strike under the wings, and he dropped lightly to the earth.”
In response to such mishaps, Lilienthal developed what he called the prellbügel or “rebound bow” – a spring of bent wood to absorb and cushion the force of impact.
But while most observers were enthralled by Lilienthal’s flights, others were not so impressed. Samuel Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a figure who will become very important later in this story, said of Lilienthal’s gliders that“The aspect of the whole was heavy and clumsy,” while Hiram Maxim dismissed Lilienthal as a mere parachutist. Lilienthal in turn stated that all Maxim had accomplished was to show other men how not to fly. Mic. Drop.
Indeed, while Lilienthal’s work was very advanced in many respects, in others it was curiously archaic. In contrast to nearly all his contemporaries, Lilienthal believed that the future of manned flight lay in flapping-wing ornithopters, and even constructed a pair of prototypes powered by a lightweight carbon dioxide engine. Unsurprisingly, neither could be made to fly. And for all their record-breaking endurance and maneuverability, Lilienthal’s famous gliders were dangerously unstable and difficult to control. This instability would prove Lilienthal’s undoing when on August 9, 1896, a sudden gust of wind caught his glider and dashed it to the ground. With no prellbügel installed to cushion the fall, Lilienthal was mortally injured, and died two days later of a broken spine. Despite his many contributions to the advancement and promotion of aviation, it was clear that Lilienthal’s approach to flight research was as much of a dead end as Ader and Maxim’s. If humans were to conquer the skies, a new, more integrated approach would be needed. And the man who would form the intellectual hub of this new phase of aviation research was a now largely-forgotten figure named Octave Chanute.
Born in Paris in 1832, Chanute moved to the United States at the age of six. After working for many years as a railroad construction worker, Chanute taught himself the principles of physics and design and established himself as a talented civil engineer, masterminding such projects as the Union Stockyards in Chicago and the bridge across the Missouri River in Kansas City. By the time he became involved in the race for heavier-than-air flight, he was nearly 60 years old and running his own engineering firm in Chicago.
Unlike many of the figures in this story, Chanute claimed no particular childhood fascination with flight, his interest being piqued later in life after reading articles on the flight of birds and the aerodynamics of structures like roofs and bridges. Steadily, Chanute began gathering all the information he could find on the subject, amassing an extensive personal archive on the latest developments in aeronautics. This prompted Chanute’s friend Mathias Forney, editor of the Railroad and Engineering Journal, to commission a series of articles on the development of flying machines. Chanute enthusiastically dove into the project, attending lectures at aeronautics conferences and corresponding with dozens of experts in the field. The first of his articles appeared in October 1891 and was followed by 26 more, which Chanute later compiled into a book titled Progress in Flying Machines. The most comprehensive survey to date of the state of the art of aviation, the book became a must-have for any aeronautical experimenter and made Chanute a sought-after expert in the field. Scientists, engineers, and backyard tinkerers from around the world wrote to Chanute for advice and guidance, which he gladly provided – along with the occasional sum of cash to help particularly promising project get off the ground.
Though mainly a theoretician, Chanute did make one brief but important foray into the world of hands-on experimentation. Through his various correspondences, Chanute gathered a team of three young aviation enthusiasts eager to work with him: Augustus Herring, William Avery, and William Butusov. In June 1896, the team arrived on the south shore of Lake Michigan to test out a number of experimental gliders they had built. Herring’s glider was a traditional Lilienthal type, which unsurprisingly proved difficult to control and failed to fly very far. After only a few flights the machine crashed and was damaged beyond repair, prompting Chanute to declare he was“glad to be rid of it.”
Chanute’s glider, on the other hand, was of a more radical, experimental design. Dubbed the Katydid, it had no fewer than six pairs of 2-metre-long wings, mounted on special hinges to allow them to pivot in any direction. As Chanute explained:
“[Katydid is] based upon just the reverse of the principles involved in the Lilienthal apparatus. Instead of the man moving about, to bring the centre of gravity under the centre of pressure, it was intended that the wings should move automatically so as to bring the moveable centre of pressure back over the centre of gravity, which latter would remain fixed. That is to say, that the wings should move instead of the man.”
This emphasis on natural stability represented a new approach to heavier-than-air flight – one which would remain influential for many years. Indeed, the belief that aircraft should be inherently stable prompted telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell – who will pop up again later in this story – to throw himself into the development of giant manned, powered kites – a bizarre and forgotten technological dead end we’ve already covered in our video That Time the Inventor of the Telephone Devoted His Life to Commercial Manned Giant Kites over on our sister channel Higher Learning.
Though his assistants were initially hesitant to test Katydid due to its novelty, it proved far more stable than the Lilienthal design – exactly as Chanute had intended. And while it only managed to glide a distance of 25 metres, Chanute was confident that its performance could be improved.
After a short break in July, the team returned to Lake Michigan in August for more testing. This time, William Butusov had brought his own glider design, the bat-winged Albatross. Launched off a special ramp, the curiously old-fashioned craft performed poorly and was swiftly abandoned. Chanute’s improved Katydid fared better, doubling its previous distance record, but the real star of the show was a brand-new glider created by Chanute and Augustus Herring. Looking more like a modern aeroplane than anything which had come before, the Chanute-Herring glider was a biplane whose wings were made rigid by tensioned wires forming a Pratt Truss. Adapted by Chanute from bridge design, this structure would remain standard for aircraft construction well into the 1920s. Fitted with a cruciform tail for greater directional stability, the Chanute-Herring glider performed exceptionally well, achieving glide distances of up to 107 metres and proving remarkably easy to control. As Chanute later reported:
“[The machine was] steady, easy to handle before starting, and under good control when under way – a motion of the operator’s body of not over two inches proving as effective as a motion of five or more inches in the Lilienthal machine.”
Indeed, the team became so confident in the design that by the time their second experimental session ended in late September, they had begun offering free glider rides to curious onlookers. Buoyed by this success, Augustus Herring wanted to push ahead and fit the glider with an engine and propeller. Chanute disagreed, believing that more glide tests were needed., prompting Herring to break from the group and strike out on his own. Two years later on October 11, 1898, he arrived on the beach near St. Joseph, Michigan with a new version of the glider powered by a lightweight compressed-air engine. After climbing to the top of a tall dune, he turned on the engine and cast off, a correspondent from the Chicago Record describing what happened next:
“It was really flying. Already the machine had covered and distance of 50 or 60 feet when the speed perceptively slackened and a little father on the apparatus came gently to rest on the sand.”
A week and a half later Herring made another series of flights, covering a maximum distance of 22 metres in 10 seconds. Like so many others, Herring would claim to the end of his days to have made the world’s first powered, heavier-than-air flight. However, there is little evidence of this, for all of Herring’s flights were made down a slope and were of such short duration that it is impossible to tell whether his craft ever achieved sustained flight under its own power.
While the accomplishments of Chanute and his team might seem like a minor step forward, it was fast becoming apparent that all the pieces of the aviation puzzle were nearly in reach – someone just needed to put them all together. And in the 1890s, the man seen as most likely to do so was Samuel Pierpont Langley.
Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1834, in 1864 Langley quit a promising career in architecture to pursue his real passion: astronomy. Like Octave Chanute, Langley had no formal education in his chosen field, instead choosing to teach himself through intensive study of the existing literature. So successful was he that just three years later in 1867 he was awarded a 20-year tenure as Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Western University of Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh, where in short order he transformed the school’s small, run-down Allegheny Observatory into a world-class institution. Among Langley’s many accomplishments were the development of the Allegheny System of standard time – the first such system to be adopted by the United States – and the invention of the bolometer, a highly-sensitive infrared detector that launched the field of infrared astronomy.
In 1887, Langley was asked to serve part-time as assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Four years later he was promoted to the prestigious position of Secretary, and moved to Washington, D.C. to take up his post. The position gave Langley access to vast resources with which to pursue his scientific interests – including the physics of heavier-than-air flight. Langley began small, testing various airfoil sections in a whirling-arm apparatus and building hundreds of small rubber band-powered flying models. Like Hiram Maxim before him, Langley believed that all that mattered was developing an engine light and powerful enough to get an craft into the air; directional control was a separate problem that could be solved at a later date. The thought of testing aircraft designs in glider form apparently never even occurred to him.
In 1891, Langley and a team of machinists began building a large unmanned free-flight model he dubbed the Aerodrome after the Greek aerodromoi or “air runner.” This term would later be applied to the fields used by aircraft to take off and land. Built on a long wooden-truss frame, the 8-kilogram craft sported two pairs of 4-metre long wings set at an upward dihedral for roll stability, a small cruciform tail, and was powered by a miniature 1-horsepower steam engine driving twin propellers. The vehicle was launched from a special steam-powered catapult mounted atop a houseboat, which Langley anchored in a secluded bend in the Potomac River near Quantico, Virginia.
By 1894, the first model, Aerodrome 0, was ready for flight testing. Unfortunately for Langley, early results were not promising. Again and again the models plunged into the Potomac, the structure having failed or the engine randomly cut out. Undaunted, Langley kept trying, building progressively more sophisticated models with strengthened frames and improved engines. Finally, after his first 5 models had failed dismally, Langley finally made a breakthrough when at 3:05 PM on May 6, 1896, Aerodrome No.5 rocketed off the catapult. In attendance that day was Alexander Graham Bell – inventor of the telephone and later an aviation pioneer in his own right – who described what happened next:
“[The model] rose at first directly into the face of the wind, moving at all times with remarkable steadiness, and subsequently swinging around in large curves of perhaps a hundred yards in diameter, and continually ascending until its steam was exhausted. At a lapse of about a minute and a half, and at a height which I judged to be between eighty and one hundred feet in the air, the wheels ceased turning.”
By the time Aerodrome No.5 touched down gently in the water, it had traveled a little more than a kilometre in minute and fifteen seconds. Later that afternoon, after the waterlogged craft had been fished from the river and dried out, Langley repeated the experiment and achieved similar results. Six months later, a further improved version of the Aerodrome flew 1.2 kilometres metres in one and a half minutes. Bell, awestruck by what he had witnessed, later wrote:
“It seems to me that no one who was present on this interesting occasion could have failed to recognize that the practicability of mechanical flight had been demonstrated.”
Indeed, while all but forgotten today, the events of May 6, 1896 stand as one of the great milestones in the history of flight, being the first time a heavier-than-air craft of any kind had achieved sustained, level flight under its own power. Yet, being unmanned and lacking a control system, Aerodrome No.5 fell just short of clinching the ultimate prize.
Incredibly, despite having come so far, Langley was initially content to end his research there and leave others to work out the remaining details. It was only under intense public pressure that he finally agreed to build a full-sized, manned version of the Aerodrome. Meanwhile, Alexander Graham Bell persuaded President William McKinley to release $50,000 of the War Department’s budget to fund the venture. Believing that a flying machine might prove useful in the recently-declared Spanish-American War, McKinley provided the funding on the condition that Langley deliver two working prototypes by the end of 1899. With such lavish resources at his disposal, it seemed obvious to all that if anyone was going to crack the secret of manned, heavier-than-air flight, it was Samuel Langley. But Langley would not enjoy this near-monopoly on aviation research for long, and soon found himself facing stiff competition from an ingenious pair of bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio. Enter the Wright Brothers.
Born on April 16, 1867 and August 19, 1871, respectively, Wilbur and Orville Wright were the third and fourth of five children born to Milton and Susan Wright – preceded by brothers Reichlin and Lorin and followed by sister Katherine. A bishop in the United Brethren Church, Milton Wright encouraged inquisitiveness, inventiveness, and industriousness in his household. A brilliant woman in her own right, Susan Wright could build or fix just about anything, while the Wright children invented all sorts of contraptions like paper folders, printing presses, and even improvements to hay baling machines. Indeed, it was Milton Wright who first sparked Orville and Wilbur’s nascent fascination with aviation when, one evening in 1878, he returned home bearing a gift hidden in his hands:
“Before we could see what it was, he tossed it into the air. Instead of falling to the floor, as we expected, it flew across the room until it struck the ceiling, where it fluttered awhile, and finally sank to the floor.” – Wilbur Wright
It was a model helicopter, built of paper and bamboo and powered by an elastic band. Enraptured by the device, Wilbur and Orville spent the next few days studying how it worked and building and test-flying their own copies. This kind of collaborative experimentation came naturally to the brothers, and would prove key to their later endeavours. As Wilbur later recalled:
“From the time we were little children, my little brother Orville and myself lived together, played together, worked together, and, in fact, thought together.”
But aviation was just one of many passing fancies, and the brothers soon moved on to other things. Having little use for formal education, neither brother attended college, with Orville not even bothering to finish high school. Instead, he started his own print shop, doing job printing for local businesses and later apprenticing at a Dayton print shop. Wilbur, on the other hand, took courses in various subjects including Greek and trigonometry, until a freak accident set him on a different path. A promising athlete, at age 18 Wilbur was struck across the face with a hockey stick, smashing several teeth and requiring him to undergo numerous reconstructive surgeries. In the wake of this incident Wilbur’s health seriously declined, causing him to withdraw from society and spend most of his time in his study, reading up on every subject imaginable.
Meanwhile, in 1889, Orville expanded his print shop and launched the weekly newspaper called West Side News. When this proved moderately successful, Orville expanded it into a four-page daily called The Evening Item. Unfortunately, the Item could not compete with the big Dayton dailies, and the publication soon folded. Undeterred, Orville tried to go back and complete his high school education, but soon grew bored and returned to his job printing business.
Then, in 1892, Orville stumbled upon a new technology that would change his and his brother’s lives forever. That year, Orville purchased one of the newfangled “safety bicycles” which had recently appeared on the market. With two wheels of equal size, safety bicycles were far more stable and manageable than the old “penny farthing” high-wheelers, and had kicked off a worldwide cycling craze- and for more on the surprising historical impact of the bicycle, please check out our previous videos How Bicycles Caused the Downfall of the British Empire, How a French Political Scandal Created One of the World’s Greatest Races, How Did a Tire Company Become the Global Arbiter of Cultural Taste?, and We Still Don’t Know How Bicycles Work.
Seeing a golden business opportunity, Orville set up a bicycle sales and repair shop, and even convinced Wilbur to leave his study to help run it. Business was so brisk that Orville soon shut down his printing shop, and by 1896 the brothers were even manufacturing their own proprietary line of bicycles. It was also in that year that the Wright Brothers learned of the death of Otto Lilienthal, the famous German “flying man.” More than any other event, it was this news which sparked the Wrights’ obsession with aviation. In typical fashion, they read every book and paper on aviation they could get their hands on, soon coming to a stunning conclusion:
“Almost the only great problem which has not been pursued by a multitude of investigators, and therefore carried to a point where progress is very difficult…We could not understand that there was anything about a bird that would enable it to fly that could not be built on a larger scale and used by man. If the bird’s wings could sustain it in the air without the use of any muscular effort, we did not see why man could not be sustained by the same means.” – Wilbur Wright
Fortuitously, the Wrights had found themselves in the ideal position to pursue the dream of flight. Not only did the bicycle shop provide them with all the tools and money they needed, but business was brisk in the spring, summer, and fall and very slow in the winter, giving them several months every year in which to devote themselves to aviation research.
Having exhausted all resources in Dayton, in 1899 Wilbur next wrote to leading experts including Samuel Langley and Octave Chanute asking for more information on aeronautics. In response, the Wrights received – and promptly devoured – a number of technical pamphlets as well as an extensive bibliography including Samuel Langley’s Experiments in Aerodynamics and Story of Experiments in Mechanical Flight; Octave Chanute’s Progress in Flying Machines; Otto Lilienthal’s The Problem of Flying and Practical Experiments in Soaring; and French theorist Louis Couillard’s Empire of the Air. Having caught up on the state of the art, the Wrights came to the conclusion that the approach taken by previous experimenters was flat-out wrong. It was not enough to just brute-force a machine into the air or make it inherently stable; to be useful, an aircraft had to be maneuverable – cable of taking the pilot, his passengers, and his cargo where they needed to go. Therefore, building a successful flying machine required first developing an efficient, fully-controllable glider, then fitting it with an engine.
But Otto Lilienthal’s method of throwing the pilot’s weight around was impractical and dangerous; instead, the Wrights hit upon the idea of twisting the aircraft’s wings to control its flight, just like birds do. Unfortunately, no matter what the Wrights came up with, there seemed to be no way of implementing this “wing warping” scheme on a practical glider. But then, a moment of serendipity intervened. One day in July 1899, a customer came into the Wrights’ bicycle shop to buy a new inner tube. As Wilbur chatted with the customer, he idly played with the long cardboard box, twisting it back and forth. Suddenly, inspiration struck: if they built a biplane, its wings braced with a tensioned-wire Pratt truss like the Chanute-Herring biplane, then the wingtips could easily be twisted using a system of cables and pulleys. Together, Wilbur and Orville quickly worked out the details of the design and within a few days built a small kite to test their ideas. Built of wood and canvas, the kite had twin wings 1.5 metres wide, a horizontal tail for longitudinal stability, and a pair of cables connected to the wing-warping mechanism for lateral control. Orville was on a camping trip when Wilbur tested first tested the kite in a field just outside Dayton; it proved so manoeuvrable that he excitedly ran to the campsite to tell his brother the good news.
Buoyed by this success, the Brothers turned their sights to building a full-sized, man-carrying glider. But first, they needed a place to fly it. Some months before, Wilbur had written to the United States Weather Bureau asking for locations easily accessible from Dayton where the wind was strong and consistent enough for “scientific kite flying.” He soon received a response from weather station manager Joseph J. Dosher, who recommended a desolate stretch of beach near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina:
“The beach here is about one mile wide, clear of trees or high hills and extends for nearly 60 miles in same condition. The wind blows mostly from the north and northeast in September and October. I am sorry to say you could not rent a house here so you will have to bring tents.”
By the fall of 1900 the Wrights had completed their first full-scale experimental glider. A wire-trussed biplane just like their small-scale kite, it had a wingspan of 5 metres and an airfoil section taken directly from Otto Lilienthal’s published lift tables. The pilot lay prone in the centre of the lower wing, operating a front-mounted horizontal stabilizer with a hand lever and the wing-warping mechanism with a pivoting foot bar.
While Orville tended the bicycle shop and put the finishing touches on the glider, Wilbur set out for North Carolina to set up their base camp, arriving on September 13, 1900. In those days Kitty Hawk was a bleak, desolate place, with little more than a small weather station, a post office, a United States Lifesaving Service station, and a handful of houses constantly choked by the windblown sand. Wilbur lodged with postmaster William J. Tate, borrowing his horse and cart to transport his tools and materials to a site around a kilometre away. There he erected a large canvas lean-to in which to assemble the glider. Orville arrived on September 28 with provisions and the canvas tent in which the brothers would spend the rest of the season.
At first, the winds were so strong that the Wrights chose to test their glider as a moored kite. They performed all manner of experiments, flying the glider both unloaded and ballasted with 34 kilograms of chains and moving the horizontal tail from the front to the back – just to see how these changes affected the craft’s performance. Overall, the glider proved just as maneuverable as the earlier kite, though on October 10, a stray gust of wind slammed the craft into the stand, smashing it to pieces. At first the Wrights considered packing up and returning to Dayton, but the following day they doggedly began piecing the glider back together. After three days the work was done, and along with postmaster Bill Tate and his brother Dan, the Wrights carried the glider 2.5 kilometres away to a stretch of tall sand dunes known as the Kill Devil Hills. Once the pilot had crawled into position, the Tates lifted the glider by its wingtips and launched it off the edge of the dune. The Brothers found the craft remarkably responsive, the sensitive controls allowing them to follow every dip and rise in the landscape with ease. Over the following two weeks they performed dozens of successful flights, covering distances of up to 120 metres. Finally, on October 23, they broke camp and returned to Dayton.
Though the 1900 glider trials had been a great success, the machine had not performed nearly as well as Lilienthal’s lift tables had predicted, leading the Wrights to suspect that the great German pioneer’s data might be in error. Upon arriving back in Dayton, the Wrights threw themselves into the design of an even bigger, more sophisticated glider, nearly doubling its wing area and increasing the wing’s camber or curvature in an attempt to increase lift. The Wrights intended to return to Kitty Hawk in September 1901, but in their excitement moved the testing period up to July. In the meantime, they hired a mechanic named Charles Taylor to run the bicycle shop full-time in their absence.
The Wrights arrived back at Kitty Hawk in July 10, 1901, whereupon they began construction of a sturdier wooden hangar in which to assemble their glider. The heat and humidity were stifling, as was were the swarms of mosquitoes, as Orville wrote to his sister Katherine:
“They chewed us clear through our underwear and socks, Lumps began swelling all over my body like hen’s eggs. Misery! Misery!”
Yet despite these hardships, by July 27 glider was ready, and the Wrights headed to the Kill Devil Hills to try it out. After a number of false starts due to centre of gravity issues, they finally got the machine to fly smoothly. Despite being the largest and heaviest glider ever flown up to that point, it proved just as responsive as the previous model and was soon making regular 100 metre flights. But just as before, the glider produced far less lift than Lilienthal’s tables predicted. It was also dangerously unstable, tending to suddenly pitch up or down without warning. On more than one occasion, the brothers were only saved from a bone-crunching crash by their lightning-quick reflexes. The brothers also noted another strange phenomenon: when banking, the glider sometimes snapped into a violent, uncontrolled yaw – what today pilots call a spin. During one flight this effect caused the glider to slam into the dune, throwing Orville headfirst into the elevator. Luckily, he wasn’t significantly hurt, and the brothers decided to keep the elevator mounted forward – what is today known as a canard configuration – as a precaution against future crashes.
On August 4, the Wrights were joined by a special guest: none other than Octave Chanute, who provided the brothers with two of his proteges, Edward Huffaker and George Spratt, as assistants. He also brought news that Samuel Langley had almost spent his War Department grant, but his full-scale Aerodrome was still nowhere near complete. So despite their relative lack of resources, the Wrights were still very much in the race. Soon after Chanute’s arrival, the Wrights resumed their test flights, having reduced the curvature of their airfoils in an attempt to improve the stability of their glider. The modifications seemed to work, with the glider achieving multiple flights of up to 120 metres before the Wrights broke camp on October 23.
By now it was clear to the Wrights that Lilienthal’s lift tables – regarded as gospel by so many experimenters – were woefully inaccurate. They thus embarked on a methodical research project to gather accurate data for themselves. They began by building a simple lift balance from a bicycle wheel mounted horizontally on the handlebars of one of their own St. Clair-brand bicycles. To this they mounted a small model of an airfoil section and a flat plate of equivalent surface area. By riding the bicycle around to generate airflow and adjusting the angle of the flat plate until the torque produced by both surfaces matched, the Wrights were able to measure the lift-to-drag ratio of any given airfoil section. It took just a handful of tests to confirm their suspicions: Lilienthal’s tables were worthless. But the bicycle lift balance was nowhere near precise enough to generate the tables the Wrights needed, so they instead built a small wooden wind tunnel driven by the same 1-horsepower motor that ran their shop machinery. Inside, they mounted a delicate lift balance built of hacksaw blades and bicycle spokes which, like the bicycle wheel balance, allowed airfoil sections to be compared to an equivalent flat plate. Using this equipment, the Wrights tested 48 different airfoil sections, eventually compiling an extensive set of highly-accurate lift tables. As Orville later boasted:
“I believe we possessed more data on cambered surfaces, a hundred times over, than all of our predecessors put together.”
Based on this data, the Wrights set about designing a third glider. Their research had revealed that a longer, narrower wing with a shallower camber was ideal, so the 1902 glider increased the wingspan from 7 to 10 metres, decreased the chord or width from 2 to 1.5 metres, and the camber from 1 in 9 to 1 in 24. The craft also featured a new system for controlling the wing warping mechanism: a wooden cradle which the pilot operated by shifting their hips. Finally, the Wrights fitted the glider with a fixed, twin vertical tail in the hopes of correcting the sideslip problem.
The Wrights arrived in Kitty Hawk for the 1902 season on August 28, whereupon they set about repairing and expanding their wooden hangar. They began reassembling the glider on September 8, and by the 19th were ready for flight tests. At first, the Wrights’ upgrades appeared to have worked: the recalculated camber produced exactly as much lift as predicted, while the vertical tail seemed to have eliminated the sideslip problem. But then, on September 23, Orville was piloting the glider when:
“I was sailing along smoothly when I noticed that one wing was getting a little too high and that the machine was slowly sidling off in the opposite direction.”
Despite Orville’s attempts to compensate, the glider suddenly pitched up, stalled, and crashed to the ground. Thankfully, Orville was unhurt, but it was clear that the vertical tail had not solved the problem. Indeed, 10 out of the 75 glides performed up to that point had ended in uncontrolled sideslips. After carefully examining the problem, the Wrights concluded that the fixed tail was actually making the instability worse, and came up with the idea of making the vertical rudders moveable to allow the pilot to compensate for the unwanted yawing motion. While they initially worried about the pilot having to manipulate yet another set of controls, in the end they decided to link the rudder and wing warping cables together so they were both operated by the hip cradle. To their delight, this solution worked perfectly; with the pilot now able to control all three axes of motion, the glider became a joy to fly. Today, pilots are taught to combine yaw and roll control to execute sideslip-free or coordinated turns.
With the new control system proven, the Wrights made hundreds of successful flights, to distances of up to 190 metres. Meanwhile, Octave Chanute and his proteges tested out their own, more old-fashioned designs but met with disappointing results, clearly demonstrating that the Wrights were on the right track The team broke camp on October 28. Having finally perfected an efficient, fully-controllable glider, the Wrights were finally ready to tackle the next major challenge: powered flight.
By now, the Wrights’ success was beginning to attract attention, with descriptions of their experiments appearing in aeronautical journals. This, in turn, brought a flood of correspondents from other experimenters seeking advice and data for their own research – as well as numerous copycats. In France, artillery captain Ferdinand Ferber built a crude copy of the Wrights’ glider, but without properly-curved wings or any kind of directional control system it proved an utter failure. Nonetheless, like many experimenters before him, Ferber was convinced he could brute-force his way into the air, and in late 1902 fitted his failed glider with a six horsepower engine driving a paddle-like propeller. He suspended this contraption beneath a huge cranelike whirling arm and for several months flew round and round testing the airworthiness of his craft. However, he never succeeded in achieving free flight.
One year earlier another experimenter, German immigrant Gustave Whitehead, claimed to have made a series of flights from a field near Bridgeport, Connecticut in a bat-like homemade aircraft, reaching altitudes of up to 60 metres and covering distances of seven miles. This story, widely reported at the time, led to Whitehead being declared the “father of Connecticut aviation” in 1964. However, no photographs of Whitehead’s machine in flight survive, and later analysis of his design confirmed that it could never have flown and that Whitehead’s claims – like all others of this type – were pure fantasy.
Even Samuel Langley wrote to the Wrights, requesting information on their “special curved surfaces” and “means of control” and inviting them to visit Washington at his expense. Wary that Langley would steal their hard-won data and beat them to the finish line, the Wrights politely declined the invitation and became more secretive in their work. The race, it seemed, was coming to a head.
In reality, despite the vast resources at his disposal, Langley’s bid to construct a full-scale version of his Aerodrome models had been fraught with difficulties, with the lightweight propeller geartrain alone taking four years to perfect. But the greatest challenge he faced was finding a suitable pair of engines, which each had to produce at least 12 horsepower but weigh less than 100 pounds. At first, Langley turned to Stephen M. Balzer, an engineer who in 1894 had built the first automobile to drive in New York City. Balzer worked obsessively for two years, blowing his allotted budget and bankrupting himself only to produce a 5-cylinder rotary engine that did not meet Langley’s specifications. Langley thus turned to one of his own machinists, Charles M. Manley, who after a further two years succeeded in producing a single water-cooled 5-cylinder water-cooled radial engine that weighed 200 pounds and developed 52.4 horsepower – a marvel of engineering for its time.
President McKinley’s original agreement specified the delivery of two working prototypes by the end of 1899, but Langley managed to use his extensive connections to have the contract – and his funding – extended for several more years. Finally, in the fall of 1903, the Aerodrome was complete and Langley was ready for his first flight test. Charles Manley, creator of the Aerodrome’s engine, was chosen as test pilot, and the houseboat-mounted catapult was moved to its regular anchorage near Quantico. The first test was scheduled for September 3, 1903, but Langley discovered that the humid climate had ruined the aircraft’s starting batteries and was forced to send out for new ones. Finally, on October 7, all was ready, and Manley climbed up onto the Aerodrome’s fuselage and started the engines. Somewhat optimistically, he had sewed a compass to one of his trouser legs to aid with aerial navigation. With the propellers at full speed, Manley gave the signal and the catapult was triggered. The Aerodrome shot forward, rose a little…then snagged on the end of the catapult and plunged into Potomac. Miraculously unhurt, Manley extracted himself from the tangled wreckage and swam back to the houseboat. Despite this embarrassing failure, Manley declared that:
“My confidence in the future success of the work is unchanged.”
Meanwhile, the Wright Brothers were facing many challenges of their own, including the same problem of finding a suitably light and powerful engine. After determining that no existing automobile manufacturer could design an engine to their specifications, the Wrights and their mechanic Charles Taylor set about building one themselves. In the end they produced a compact four-cylinder inline engine that weighed only 140 pounds but generated 12 horsepower. Though crude in many ways, the engine was at the same time remarkably advanced for its time, featuring one of the first aluminium blocks and direct fuel-injection systems in history.
Another major challenge involved the design of the propellers. Up until this point, aviation experimenters had largely based their propeller designs on those developed for marine propulsion. However, the fluid dynamics of water and air are very different, meaning most of these propellers were very inefficient. Furthermore, the Wrights discovered to their surprise that no formal theory of propeller design had yet been developed, with marine propellers largely being developed through trial and error. Lacking the time needed for this approach, the Wrights instead applied their knowledge of aerodynamics and developed their own propeller design theory, resulting in the first aircraft propellers designed entirely according to physical principles. As Orville wrote in June 1903:
“We had been unable to find anything of value in any of the works to which we had access, so we worked out a theory on our own on the subject, and soon discovered, as we usually do, that all the propellers built heretofore are all wrong! …Isn’t it astonishing that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so that we could discover them!”
By the fall of 1903 the Wrights had finally completed their first powered aircraft, which they dubbed the Flyer. Like the 1902 glider, it was a biplane with a canard horizontal stabilizer and twin rudders in the rear. The pilot operated the wing warping mechanism and rudders with a hip cradle and the elevators with a hand lever. However, this time the pilot’s position was moved to the left of the aircraft’s centreline, with the engine mounted to the right to balance out the pilot’s weight. The engine drove a pair of wooden propellers via a chain drive – one of many design features borrowed from bicycle technology – the propellers rotating in opposite directions to counter the effects of torque. Weighing 275 kilograms empty, the Flyer was too heavy to launch by hand; and, in any case, to unambiguously demonstrate powered, sustained flight, the aircraft had to take off from level ground under its own power. But as wheels would not work on the loose sand of the Kitty Hawk beach, the Wrights devised a simple detachable wheeled dolly that rolled along a 10-metre tack laid in the sand.
The Wrights arrived at Kitty Hawk on September 25, 1903 to find their campsite an absolute shambles. While some repairs had always been needed in previous years, 1903 season was particularly bad, with a winter of violent storms having completely destroyed the Wrights’ wooden hangar and workshop. Miraculously, however, the 1902 glider had survived almost completely intact. Despite stormy weather, the Wrights set about rebuilding the hangar and the 1902 glider, which they practiced flying while waiting for the Flyer to arrived. The components, packed in crates, arrived on October 8, along with news of Samuel Langley’s unfortunate failure. As Wilbur wrote to Octave Chanute:
“I see that Langley has had his fling, and failed. It seems to be our turn to throw now and I wonder what our luck will be.”
Wary that Langley would soon make another attempt, the Wrights abandoned their original plan to test the Flyer as a glider and decided to install the engine immediately. However, their progress was interrupted by a powerful storm, which threatened to blow down the hangar and tear off its tar paper roof. The Wrights spent days hastily nailing on braces and hammering down shingles in a desperate bid to keep the structure together, and it was not until early November that they finally got the airframe assembled and the engine installed. But the weather was just one among many problems. During static tests on November 5 the engine constantly malfunctioned, the drive chains came loose and, worst of all, the propeller shafts jerked loose and were bent beyond repair. There was nothing to do but send the shafts back to Dayton to be repaired, a process that would delay flight tests by at least 10 days.
This dismal situation was alleviated somewhat by the arrival of Octave Chanute, but the worsening weather made the wait for the repaired shafts a miserable one and made the Wrights wonder whether they would have to abandon their attempts for the season. At last, on November 20, the shafts arrived, Charles Taylor having secured the drive sprockets via the judicious application of Arnstein’s Hard Cement, a powerful adhesive widely used around the Wright’s bicycle shop. With the shafts installed and the rest of the mechanical issues sorted, the first flight test was scheduled for November 25th. However, the weather intervened once more, with a stiff 40 kilometre per hour wind, freezing rain, and finally snow giving the Wrights no choice but to wait out the storm.
Work resumed on November 28, but during a static test run the Wrights discovered to their dismay that one of the engine shafts was badly cracked. The next day, Orville set off for Dayton to fetch a new set of shafts turned from solid spring steel. With the Wrights temporarily out of the race, it was now Samuel Langley’s chance to pull ahead and clinch the coveted prize.
The weather in Washington DC was also less than ideal for flying, with the Potomac having nearly frozen over. However, the sky in early December was bright and clear; Langley would likely never get a better chance until the following spring. So, on December 8, 1903, he moved the houseboat to the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers and faced it into a steady 12.5 kilometre per hour wind. As a group of reporters and observers from the War Department looked on, Charles Manley once again climbed up onto the Aerodrome’s skeletal fuselage and started up the engines. Then, at 4:45 PM, he gave the signal and the catapult fired. Once again, the aircraft shot off the end of the track and rose into the air. This time it did not snag on the catapult, it instead rolled over onto its side before the tail suddenly crumpled, sending the machine plunging once more into the Potomac. The shattered fuselage snagged on Manley’s life preserver and began to drag him down into the icy depths; it was only with determined effort that he managed to tear himself free and swim to the surface – whereupon he immediately struck his head on a chunk of floating ice. He was soon pulled back aboard the houseboat, dazed but alive.
The second failure of the Aerodrome was a major embarrassment for the Smithsonian Institution and put an end to Langley’s aerial experiments. Of the pathetic spectacle, the New York Times wrote:
“The ridiculous fiasco white attended the attempt at aerial navigation was no unexpected. The flying machine which will really fly might be evolved fly the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one to 10 million years.”
This would turn out to be one of the most infamously short-sighted statements in the history of technological development.
Back in Kitty Hawk, the Wrights had installed their new spring-steel propeller shafts and were finally ready to make a powered test flight. Interestingly, the world’s first manned, powered, heavier-than-air flight could have taken place five days early on Sunday, December 13. However, being the pious sons of a Bishop, the Wrights had promised to keep the Sabbath holy and chose not to fly despite ideal weather. The weather the following day remained clear, but as the wind was not strong enough to attempt a takeoff from level ground, the Wrights decided to launch from the Kill Devil Hills as they had with their earlier gliders. They moved the Flyer to the base of the dunes by rolling it along the launch rail then re-laying the track, whereupon they were joined by five men from the nearby lifesaving station who helped them haul the machine to the summit and lay the launching rail down the slope. As both brothers were equally skilled pilots, they tossed a coin to decide who would make the first flight. Wilbur won, and as his brother held onto a retaining cable, he climbed aboard, settled into the hip cradle, and started up the engines. Once the propellers were whirling at full speed, Orville released the cable and the Flyer went trundling down the track. The machine immediately shot up to an altitude of around 5 metres, but despite Wilbur’s attempts to bring the nose down, the wings stalled and the machine slammed into the ground 30 metres from the end of the track, lightly damaging the left wingtip, rudder, and skid. Undaunted, the Wrights took the Flyer back to the hangar, repairs being completed by the following morning. On the morning of Thursday, December 17, 1903, they were ready to try again.
The weather that morning was brisk, with a cold 13 kilometre per hour wind blowing from the north and pools of ice-capped water covering the beach. Slowly and methodically, the Wrights laid the launching rail and checked and re-checked every component aboard the Flyer. They then performed another coin toss, which Orville won. The two brother shook hands, and Orville climbed aboard, started the engines, and waited for the propellers to spin up. Then, at 10:35, Wilbur released the retaining cable and began to run alongside as the Flyer steadily gained speed and barrelled towards the end of the track. Suddenly, the craft lifted off and rose to an altitude of 3 metres, the moment of takeoff captured in an iconic photograph taken by lifeguard John Daniels Jr. The Flyer skimmed along over the beach, rising and dipping a few times before gently touching down on the sand. Beginning to end, the flight had lasted only 12 seconds and covered a mere 36 metres – less than the wingspan of a Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet. But it didn’t matter; the Wright Brothers had achieved the seemingly impossible. As Wilbur Wright later explained:
“It was nevertheless he first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without a reduction in speed, and had finally landed at a point as high from which it started.”
The other witnesses to this historic flight were somewhat less measured in their response, with one lifeguard scrambling to the local post office crying:
“They have done it! They have done it! Damned if they ain’t flew!”
Not content to rest on their laurels, the Wright Brothers made three more flights that day, with Wilbur setting a record by flying 260 metres in 59 seconds. But while the Brothers and their assistants were carrying the Flyer back to camp, a stray gust of wind caught the aircraft and set it tumbling across the beach, smashing it beyond repair. It would never fly again.
Over the next few weeks, news of the Wright Brothers’ achievement began to appear in various publications. However, most of these reports were confused and inaccurate, with one journalist claiming that the Wrights had flown for three miles. This forced the Brothers to issue a number of written corrections in order to set the record straight. Meanwhile, confident that they no longer needed the stiff breezes of Kitty Hawk in order to take off, the Wrights moved their experiments to a dairy farm just outside Dayton known as Huffman Prairie. Here, in mid-1904, they began testing an improved design they dubbed the Flyer II. The aircraft featured a more powerful 15 horsepower engine and wings with a shallower camber, which the Wrights hoped would reduce drag. Large crowds of reporters and other witnesses gathered for the first flight tests, but due to a lack of headwind and the reduced wing camber – which reduced overall lift – Flyer II failed to get off the ground and the disappointed onlookers returned home. As Wilbur later wrote:
“Knowing that longer flights had been made with air-ships, and not knowing any essential difference between air-ships and flying machines, they were but little interested.”
This suited the Wrights just fine, as they were now free to pursue their experiments in private. To get around the headwind problem, Charles Taylor developed a special catapult powered by falling weights. Using this device, the Wrights finally coaxed Flyer II into the air and began achieving flights of ever-greater duration. On September 20, 1904, Flyer II remained airborne for 1 minute and 35 seconds, travelling 1.2 kilometres and becoming the first heavier-than-air craft to complete a full circle. This feat was witnessed by local beekeeper Amos Root, who wrote the first published eyewitness account of an aircraft in flight:
“One of the grandest sights, if not the grandest sight, of my life. Imagine a locomotive that’s left its track, and is climbing up in the air toward you – a locomotive without any wheels, we will say, but with white wings instead…! Well, now, imagine this white locomotive, with wings that spread 20 feet each way, coming right toward you with a tremendous flap of its propellers, and you will have something like what I saw.”
Over the following winter, the Wrights rebuilt the Flyer II to create the Flyer III, which featured wings with a deeper, higher-lift camber. On October 5, 1905, Wilbur Wright made aviation history once again by remaining aloft for 38 minutes and 3 seconds, covering 39 kilometres in the process. The flight could have gone on for much longer, only ending because the fuel tank ran dry. There was now no longer any doubt: manned, powered, controlled heavier-than-air flight was now a practical reality. The following year, the Wrights introduced the Model A, the first powered aircraft in history to be serially produced and sold; while in 1909 the U.S. Army Signal Corps became the first military establishment in the world to purchase a heavier-than-air flying machine. The history of transportation would never be the same again.
But how had the Wrights done it? How did a pair of bicycle mechanics with only high school educations manage to beat the world’s foremost experts with vastly greater resources to achieving manned, powered, heavier-than-air flight? In the end, the answer comes down to one simple word: methodology. While other experimenters like Hiram Maxim and Samuel Langley tried to brute-force their way into the air with powerful engines, seeing stability and control as secondary problems, the Wrights saw the problem of powered flight as a holistic one, all aspects of which had to be solved individually before they could be assembled into a viable flying machine. To this end, they embarked on a methodical glider-based research program to solve the problems of lift, stability, and directional control before they even attempted to add an engine. They were also keenly observant experimenters unafraid to question conventional wisdom, attributes which led them to compile their own, far more accurate lift tables and develop their own theory of propeller design. In short, the Wright Brothers fully understood the complexity of the problem before them as well as their own ignorance and limitations, and worked slowly, methodically, and thoughtfully to chip away at both. This humble approach is perhaps best exemplified by Wilbur Wright’s 1899 letter requesting information from the Smithsonian, in which he rather self-deprecatingly assures the recipient that:
“I am not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine….I wish to avail myself of all that is already known, and then if possible add my mite to help the future worker who will attain final success.”
In just four short years, he and his brother would succeed in accomplishing much, much more.
But while today the Wright Brothers are universally acknowledged as the fathers of modern aviation, this was not always the case. The very public failure of Samuel Langley’s Aerodrome was a huge embarrassment to the Smithsonian Institution, who out of spite and wounded pride refused to acknowledge the Wright Brothers’ accomplishment for many decades. Among the accusations leveled by the Smithsonian was that the 1903 Flyer was launched into the air by a catapult and thus had not taken off under its own power. This is a very strange claim, for not only is it entirely false, but it conveniently ignores that Langley’s Aerodrome was catapult-launched. Nice try, guys…
The debate over the primacy of the Wrights’ achievement came to a head in 1914 when Glenn Curtiss, another early aviation pioneer and a member of Alexander Graham Bell’s Aerial Experiment Association, found himself being sued by the Wright Brothers for patent infringement. By this time, the Wrights had all but stopped innovating and spent most of their time enforcing their patents against all other would-be aircraft manufacturers. Hoping to break the Wrights’ near-monopoly on aircraft production, Curtiss decided to challenge the primacy of their patents by proving that Langley’s Aerodrome could actually have flown. To this end, he contacted Dr. Charles Walcott, who had succeeded Langley as Secretary of the Smithsonian following the latter’s death in 1906. Walcott enthusiastically supported Curtiss’s project and had all Langley’s blueprints and the surviving remains of the 1903 Aerodrome sent to his factory in Hammondsport, New York. Upon receiving these materials, Curtiss came to shocking realization: the Aerodrome was fundamentally flawed and could never have flown. But Curtiss was determined to defeat the Wrights, and set about improving the design, strengthening the wings and installing a more powerful engine. But even with these fudges, the Aerodrome was still too heavy and underpowered only succeeded in remaining aloft for five seconds. Even when Curtiss installed an even more powerful V8 engine, he could only keep the ungainly craft in the air for around a minute. Yet despite the fact that the rebuilt machine barely resembled Langley’s original design, the Smithsonian seized upon Curtiss’s experiments and proudly displayed the Aerodrome in the Arts and Industries Building with the label “The first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight.” In response, in 1925 Orville Wright threatened to send the 1903 Flyer to the Kensington Science Museum in England unless the Smithsonian recanted, stating:
“I believe my course in sending our Kitty Hawk machine to a foreign museum is the only way of correcting the history of the flying machine, which by false and misleading statements has been perverted by the Smithsonian Institution.”
The Smithsonian refused, and in 1928 Orville made good on his threat. This feud raged on for another two decades, and it was not until 1948 – 45 years after the Wright’s historic flight – that the Smithsonian finally recognized the primacy of their achievement and placed the 1903 Flyer on permanent display at the newly-created National Air and Space Museum – where it remains to this day.
Expand for References
Moolman, Valerie, The Road to Kitty Hawk, The Epic of Flight, Time-Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia, 1980
Yenne, Bill, The World’s Worst Aircraft, World Publications Group, Inc, North Deighton, MA, 2001
Baals, Donald & Corliss, William, Whirling Arms and the First Wind Tunnels, NASA, https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/WindTunnel/history.html
Chanute (Octave) 1896 Biplane Glider Reproduction, The Museum of Flight, https://www.museumofflight.org/exhibits-and-events/aircraft/chanute-herring-1896-biplane-glider-reproduction
The Wright/Smithsonian Controversy, Wright Brothers, https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/History_of_the_Airplane/Doers_and_Dreamers/Wright_Smithsonian_Controversy/00_Wright_Smithsonian_Controversy_Intro.htm
Researching the Wright Way, National Air & Space Museum, https://ift.tt/PDkdmR3 made the Wrights’ wind,wind tunnel no longer exists.
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