Chapter · 1899–1903
Kitty Hawk
On a freezing Thursday morning in December 1903, on the sand at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, a machine carrying a man lifted off under its own power, flew where it was steered, and landed on ground as high as where it started. It had taken the Wright brothers four years to get there.
Two brothers and a bicycle shop
Wilbur and Orville Wright ran a bicycle business in Dayton, Ohio. They had no university degrees and no government funding. What they did have was a machine shop, patience for careful measurement, and the habit of arguing a problem through until one of them changed his mind.
In 1896 the German glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal died after a crash. The news set the brothers thinking. In May 1899 Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution asking what had been published on flight. He read everything the Smithsonian sent and came to a clear conclusion: other experimenters had made progress on wings and engines, but nobody had worked out how a pilot could control a flying machine in the air.
The problem nobody had solved
A bicycle stays up because the rider is always making small corrections. Wilbur suspected a flying machine would need the same thing: an active pilot rather than a machine built to be stable on its own. He worked out a way to twist, or "warp," the tips of a biplane's wings in opposite directions so the air would push one side up and the other down. That let a pilot bank and level the machine at will. Modern ailerons do the same job.
Why Kitty Hawk?
Gliders need steady wind and soft landings. The brothers asked the U.S. Weather Bureau for wind records, and the Outer Banks of North Carolina came out well: strong, steady breezes, tall sand dunes, and very few onlookers. They made their first trip in 1900 and returned every year after that.
1901: the numbers were wrong
The 1901 glider was the largest anyone had flown, with 290 square feet of wing. It was a disappointment. It produced only a fraction of the lift that the published tables predicted. The brothers went home to Dayton discouraged. Wilbur later remembered telling Orville that people would not fly in their lifetimes.
Then they did what scientists do. They stopped trusting the tables and built a way to test them.
Try it: the wind tunnel
In the autumn of 1901 the Wrights built a small wind tunnel in their shop. It was a wooden box about six feet long, with a fan run off the shop's engine. Inside, balances made from bicycle spokes and hacksaw blades measured the forces on small model wings. They tested hundreds of wing shapes. Among the things they found was that a constant everyone had been using for more than a century, Smeaton's coefficient, was too large.
Move the sliders and see the gap the Wrights ran into.
- 1890s tables predicted
- The air actually gives
- Glider plus pilot weighs about
- 250 lb
1902: a glider that worked
Using their own tunnel data, the brothers built a new glider for 1902. It had longer, narrower, flatter wings and a tail at the back. After some frightening spins, they made the rear rudder movable and linked it to the wing-warping controls. With that change, the glider could be steered on all three axes: pitch, roll, and yaw. They made hundreds of glides that autumn. The control problem was solved. In March 1903 they applied for a patent.
An engine and propellers
No manufacturer could supply a light enough engine, so their shop mechanic, Charlie Taylor, built one: four cylinders and roughly twelve horsepower, with an aluminum crankcase. Nobody had a working theory of propellers either. The brothers treated each blade as a wing moving in a spiral and designed the propellers on paper. The 1903 Flyer's two propellers turned in opposite directions, driven by bicycle-style chains.
December 14: a false start
The brothers tossed a coin for the first attempt, and Wilbur won. The Flyer climbed too steeply off the launching rail, stalled, and settled into the sand after about three and a half seconds. It needed repairs. They did not count it as a flight.
December 17, 1903
Three days later the wind was blowing hard and cold, more than twenty miles an hour. Men from the nearby Kill Devil Hills lifesaving station came over to help. Orville set up his camera on a tripod and asked one of them, John T. Daniels, to squeeze the bulb if anything happened.
At about 10:35 in the morning, with Orville at the controls, the Flyer moved along its wooden rail into the wind and lifted off. Daniels took the picture. That photograph is now one of the most famous ever made.
The four flights of December 17
- #1 · Orville120 ft · 12 s
- #2 · Wilbur175 ft
- #3 · Orville200 ft · 15 s
- #4 · Wilbur852 ft · 59 s
Distances are measured over the ground, into a strong headwind. Durations of the second flight vary between accounts and are omitted here.
On the fourth flight, Wilbur covered 852 feet in 59 seconds. Not long after, a gust caught the parked Flyer and tumbled it across the sand. Daniels was holding on and was swept along inside it. He was bruised but not seriously hurt. The Flyer was too badly damaged to fly again that year, and it never flew again.
That afternoon the brothers walked to the weather station in Kitty Hawk and sent a telegram to their father, Bishop Milton Wright, in Dayton. They reported four successful flights and said they would be home for Christmas.
What happened next
Few newspapers believed the story at first. The brothers kept working quietly in a cow pasture near Dayton called Huffman Prairie. By 1905 they could fly for more than half an hour, turning, circling, and landing where they chose. In 1908 Wilbur flew in public in France and Orville flew for the U.S. Army at Fort Myer, Virginia, and the world finally believed them.
Wilbur died of typhoid fever in 1912. Orville lived until 1948. The 1903 Flyer is on display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
Sources and further reading
This chapter draws on the brothers' own published accounts and the Wright Brothers Papers at the Library of Congress. A full annotated list, including which documents are in the public domain, is in preparation. Teachers: lesson materials for this chapter are coming soon.