Orville Wright

…Dayton, Ohio) and his brother Orville Wright (August 19, 1871, Dayton—January 30, 1948, Dayton) also built and flew the first fully practical airplane (1905).

…Chanute glider provided Wilbur and Orville Wright with a starting point for their own structural designs. Chanute befriended the Wright brothers, pursued an extensive correspondence with them, and visited their camp on the Outer Banks of North Carolina between 1901 and 1903. “No one was too humble to receive a…

…their own aeronautical experiments, the Wright brothers carefully studied the work of their predecessors and decided that there was little need for them to focus on wing design. “Men already know how to construct wings…,” Wilbur explained in 1901, “which when driven through the air at sufficient speed will not…

…their career in aeronautics, the Wright brothers recognized that automotive enthusiasts were producing ever lighter and more powerful internal-combustion engines. The brothers assumed that if their gliding experiments progressed to the point where they required a power plant, it would not be difficult to buy or build a gasoline engine…

…to avoid those problems, the Wright brothers created a positive control system that enabled (indeed, required) the pilot to exercise absolute command over the motion of his machine in every axis and at every moment. Others had rejected that goal because they feared that pilots would be overwhelmed by the…

…to 1903 when Wilbur and Orville Wright demonstrated an airplane capable of powered, sustained flight (see Wright flyer of 1903). The Wright brothers’ success was due to detailed research and an excellent engineering-and-development approach. Their breakthrough innovation was a pilot-operated warping (twisting) of the wings to provide attitude control and…

The American brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright were inspired by Lilienthal and by 1902 had developed a fully practical biplane (double-winged) glider that could be controlled in every direction. Fitting a small engine and two propellers to another biplane, the Wrights on December 17, 1903, made the world’s first successful…

In 1892 Wilbur and Orville Wright opened their bicycle repair shop in Dayton, where they conducted experiments that led to the first sustained and controlled flight of a powered airplane, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903; a monolith has been erected in memory of the brothers, who are…

…and built by Wilbur and Orville Wright in Dayton, Ohio, it was assembled in the autumn of 1903 at a camp at the base of the Kill Devil Hills, near Kitty Hawk, a village on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. After a first attempt failed on December 14, the…

…and flown by Wilbur and Orville Wright. It represented the final step in their quest for a practical airplane capable of staying aloft for extended periods of time under the complete control of the pilot.

Orville and Wilbur Wright built their most successful early glider in 1902. Following experimentation they decided to use a vertical rudder that was movable in flight. They then added a horizontal elevator and combined their adjustable vertical rudder with a wing-warping mechanism that permitted them to move the…

…and built by Wilbur and Orville Wright in Dayton, Ohio, during the late summer of 1902. Tested during the autumn of 1902 and again in 1903 at the Kill Devil Hills, four miles south of the village of Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the 1902 glider…

The brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright, who made the first powered, sustained, and controlled flights in an airplane on December 17, 1903, believed such an aircraft would be useful mainly for military reconnaissance. When they received the first contract for a military airplane from the U.S. government in February…

built by Wilbur and Orville Wright and sold to the U.S. Army Signal Corps in July 1909. It was the world’s first military airplane. For the Wright brothers, it represented a first step in their efforts to produce marketable aircraft incorporating the principles that they had employed six years…