At 10:35 on the morning of 17 December 1903, on a windswept strip of sand at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina — four miles south of the fishing village of Kitty Hawk that history would name instead — a bicycle mechanic from Ohio lay face-down on the lower wing of a spruce-and-muslin machine and slipped the restraining wire. A lifesaving-station volunteer named John T. Daniels, who had never operated a camera in his life, squeezed the shutter bulb at exactly the right instant. The photograph he took, one of the most reproduced images ever made, shows Orville Wright airborne and his brother Wilbur mid-stride beside the wingtip. The flight lasted twelve seconds and covered 120 feet — comfortably shorter than the wingspan of a modern jumbo jet.
The brothers flew four times that morning, taking turns into a freezing headwind of more than twenty miles an hour. On the fourth flight Wilbur kept the machine aloft for 59 seconds and 852 feet. It was his redemption: he had won the coin toss for the very first attempt on 14 December, and stalled the Flyer into the sand within seconds. Shortly after the fourth landing a gust caught the aircraft and rolled it over; the world's first successful aeroplane never flew again.
Nine days earlier, the smart money had been on someone else entirely. Samuel Pierpont Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, had spent roughly 50,000 dollars of War Department money, plus Smithsonian funds, on his tandem-winged Aerodrome. On 8 December 1903 it was catapulted from a houseboat on the Potomac and collapsed straight into the river — its second dunking in two months — to national ridicule. The Wrights, by contrast, had spent about a thousand dollars of profits from their Dayton bicycle shop.
Control, not power
The brothers succeeded because they asked a different question. Rivals treated flight as a problem of brute power; the Wrights, watching soaring birds and thinking like cyclists, treated it as a problem of balance and control. Wilbur's breakthrough came while idly twisting an empty inner-tube box: a wing whose tips could be warped in opposite directions would let a pilot bank and level at will. They chose their proving ground scientifically too, writing to the US Weather Bureau and picking remote Kitty Hawk for its steady Atlantic winds and forgiving sand. Three seasons of gliders followed, in 1900, 1901 and 1902, and when the published lift tables of the German glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal let them down, they built a six-foot wind tunnel above the bicycle shop in 1901 and methodically tested around two hundred miniature wing shapes, turning aeronautics from guesswork into engineering. Only once their 1902 glider could be steered with confidence did they add an engine: no manufacturer would supply one light enough, so their shop machinist, Charlie Taylor, built a 12-horsepower engine with an aluminium block in six weeks, and the brothers carved their own propellers on the then-novel insight that a propeller is simply a wing travelling in a spiral.
The patent war
Back home near Dayton, at a cow pasture called Huffman Prairie, they kept refining the machine in near-total obscurity; by 1905 their Flyer III could circle overhead for more than half an hour, covering some 24 miles, while the world's press largely declined to believe it. Having invented the aeroplane, the Wrights then very nearly strangled it. Their patent, granted in 1906, covered lateral control so broadly that they sued almost everyone who flew for profit, above all the motorcycle-racer-turned-aviator Glenn Curtiss. The litigation consumed them: Wilbur died of typhoid fever in 1912, aged 45, with the Curtiss suit still grinding on, and American aviation stagnated so badly that when the United States entered the First World War in 1917, its pilots went to war in French and British machines. The government had to push the industry into a patent pool to get warplanes built at all.
A stranger feud outlived the war. In 1914 Curtiss extensively modified Langley's wrecked Aerodrome and coaxed it briefly off a lake, allowing the Smithsonian to label its late founder's machine the first aeroplane "capable" of flight. Orville's revenge was exile: in 1928 he shipped the original 1903 Flyer to the Science Museum in London, where it sat out even the Blitz. The Smithsonian formally recanted in 1942, and the Flyer finally came home to Washington in 1948, weeks after Orville's death. In 1969 Neil Armstrong carried scraps of its wood and fabric in his pocket to the surface of the Moon.
Twelve seconds, 120 feet, and a photograph taken by a man who had never used a camera: rarely has so short a journey carried the world so far.
Quiz nuggets
- The first powered flight on 17 December 1903 lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet, with Orville Wright as pilot.
- The flights took place at Kill Devil Hills, four miles south of Kitty Hawk; Wilbur's fourth flight that day covered 852 feet in 59 seconds.
- Samuel Langley's government-funded Aerodrome crashed into the Potomac on 8 December 1903, nine days before the Wrights flew.
- In 1901 the Wrights built their own wind tunnel and tested around 200 wing shapes above their Dayton bicycle shop.
- The original Wright Flyer hung in London's Science Museum from 1928 to 1948 because of Orville's feud with the Smithsonian.