Brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright are credited with creating and flying the world’s first heavier-than-air, controlled, crewed aircraft. One-time bicycle mechanics with only some public high school education, the two made history in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on Dec. 17, 1903, when they successfully flew a 600-pound, 40-foot-wide plane over 120 feet in 12 seconds under its own power.
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Gliders studied by the Wrights were unwieldy and unable to be fully controlled by the pilot. Wilbur and Orville invented so-called wing-warping which twisted their surface and allowed for the plane to roll (or turn), all using a device manipulated by the hips.
North Carolina’s Outer Banks at the turn of the 20th century were not the summer resort destinations they are today. The brothers sought privacy as they toyed with their aviation designs, camping in Kill Devil Hills and using its sand dunes as launch points for early glider designs.
Using a then-state-of-the-art Korona V, rescue member John T. Daniels was tasked with squeezing the device’s rubber bulb the moment the plane left the wooden track on the sand. The camera produced negatives on 5 by 7 sheets of glass.
The brothers’ most intense period of creativity and progress came between 1901 and 1910, when their work at Kitty Hawk culminated in the first powered flight. The pair, however, were not the most business-savvy, and they struggled to take financial advantage of their pioneering work in the field.
Coverage of the pair’s success often described them as barely educated bike mechanics. They struggled to gain traction with the public. It took interest from French business leaders and the US Signal Corps to bring the pair into separate demonstrations of their planes.
Their estate offered 300 negatives to the Library of Congress in 1948 after Orville’s death, most of which were taken by the brothers between 1897 and 1928. The collection serves as a visual timeline of their adult lives.
In the late 1800s, the duo managed several bike shops in the Dayton, Ohio area, where they would sharpen their teeth in engineering and design. Some of their earliest aviation efforts were funded by their bicycle business and initiated in their bike shops.
Taking inspiration from gliding pioneer Otto Lilienthal—whose gliders resembled the wings of birds—Wilbur took to observing birds to understand how they do it, in order to solve the problem of flight. This opening episode on the brothers explores their lives and accomplishments.
Since the museum’s opening in 1976, the wood-and-muslin plane has been available for public viewing with a model of Orville, the younger brother, lying on the plane’s mid-section.
While the wood is the same used in the 1903 flight, the muslin has been replaced twice. After laying forgotten in sheds, the vehicle eventually took on national importance. However, the Smithsonian Institution did not recognize it until the 1940s, after it spent time at the Science Museum in London.
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