The first powered flight

The story

Two brothers and a bicycle shop

Wilbur and Orville Wright were two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, in the United States. They had no university degrees and were not rich: they ran a bicycle shop, building and repairing their customers' two-wheelers. But they were very curious, and they had a passion: flight. As boys they had been given a toy with a paper-and-cane propeller that rose into the air when an elastic band was released, and they had never forgotten it.

When they read that the German Otto Lilienthal, a pioneer of glider flights, had died in an accident in 1896, they decided to study the problem seriously. They wrote to the Smithsonian Institution to get everything that had been published about flight, and they studied it. They soon realised that the hardest problem was not getting off the ground, but controlling the aeroplane once it was in the air.

Learning to steer in the air

Bicycles had taught them something important: to stay balanced, you have to learn to lean and turn in the right way. The Wrights thought an aeroplane should behave in the same way. In 1899 they tried slightly twisting the tips of the wings so that the machine tilted to the right or to the left, and then they added a vertical rudder and a horizontal one: it was a three-axis control system, still at the heart of how every aeroplane flies today.

They looked for a place with steady winds and soft sand dunes to cushion falls, and found it at Kitty Hawk, a fishing village on the coast of North Carolina. Between 1900 and 1902 they went back every year with better and better gliders. They even built a small wind tunnel inside a wooden box, with a fan driven by an engine, to test two hundred wing shapes and find out which worked best. They discovered that many figures in the books of those who came before them were wrong, and they did the calculations themselves.

The Flyer

For 1903 only an engine was missing. No maker sold one that was light and powerful enough, so they had one built by their mechanic, Charlie Taylor: a small aluminium petrol engine with about twelve horsepower. They also studied propellers as if they were wings that spin round, and made them with great care. The Flyer, a biplane of spruce wood and cloth, with two propellers behind the wings and the pilot lying on his stomach, was ready.

On the morning of 17 December 1903, at Kitty Hawk, a cold, strong wind was blowing. With the help of five local people, the brothers carried the Flyer onto its wooden rail. Orville lay down at the controls and at 10:35 the aeroplane lifted off the ground. It flew for twelve seconds and for about 37 metres, a shorter distance than the wing of a big airliner today, but it was the first flight of an aeroplane with a person on board, driven by an engine and able to be steered. A witness managed to take a photograph, which became famous.

That day there were three more flights, with the two brothers taking turns. The last one, by Wilbur, lasted 59 seconds and covered 260 metres. Soon afterwards a gust of wind overturned the Flyer, which was damaged. Orville sent a telegram to their father, a bishop, saying that the flight had been a success and that they would be home for Christmas.

From a field in Dayton to the world

For two years almost nobody believed the Wright brothers, partly because they did not want to show their aeroplane before they had patented their ideas. They kept improving the design in a field near Dayton, and in 1905 their third aeroplane flew for 39 minutes. In 1908 Wilbur went to France and made public flights at Le Mans: the European pilots, amazed, realised how far ahead the Wrights were. Soon afterwards, in America, the army bought one of their aeroplanes.