The Wright Brothers: Biography, Businesses, and First Flight

Born in 1867 Millville Indiana and 1871 Dayton Ohio, Wilbur and Orville Wright became inseparable playmates from an early age, and when their father brought home a rubber band powered helicopter for his curious young sons, the brothers developed a lifelong passion for aviation and human flight.

Wright Brothers in Business

As young men, the duo opened a printing shop that prospered on advertisements for local businesses, and while their two newspapers eventually failed in Dayton’s over-saturated market, in 1892, the brothers opened a bicycle shop—all the rage at the time—which soon became their primary source of income.

Aerodynamics and Biomimicry

Enthralled by the work of German aviator Otto Lilienthal’s more than 2,000 successful flights in 16 glider designs, the Wright Brothers built a wind tunnel to test the flight characteristics of airplane models—later expanding many of their designs into full-scale gliders or kites, as they called them, creating a concept called “wing warping” from their observations of birds in flight.

The brothers then correctly reasoned that a free-flying airplane had to be controlled by three primary axes—roll, pitch and yaw—leading them to build moveable flight surfaces on the wings, elevator and rudder of their eventual first gas-powered airplane.

Wright Brothers First Flight

Known for consistently strong winds, the brothers transported their creation to Kitty Hawk North Carolina, and on December 17th, 1903, Wilbur Wright became the first human to fly a powered airplane without catastrophe, traveling at low altitude for 852 feet, with an elapsed flight time of 59 seconds.

Faced with skepticism in the States, once their designs were patented in 1908, Orville returned to the skies to conduct trials for the U.S. Army, while Wilbur found a much more receptive audience in France, where he made evermore daring flights that soon raised the brothers to celebrity status in Europe and eventually back home.

First Death in Aviation History

Almost in tandem with Wilbur’s flights in Europe, Orville suffered severe injuries in a crash that took the life of Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge—the first fatality in aviation history—and after Orville’s injuries had healed, the brothers formed the Wright Company, which made them exceedingly wealthy by selling airplanes to European nations and the United States, which would later pave the way for the birth of combat aviation in the First World War.

Four years later, Wilbur contracted typhoid fever on a trip to Boston, passing away at his family home in Dayton on May 30th of that same year. Orville would live on as a wealthy bachelor for 36 more years, passing away from a heart attack on January 30th, 1948, just three and a half months after Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 rocket plane, a scant 45 years after the Wright Brothers’ landmark flight.