Orville Wright

Orville Wright, with his elder brother Wilbur, ran a bicycle repair and manufacturing business in Dayton, Ohio, and shared credit for every stage of the Wright brothers work in aeronautics, from the 1901 wind tunnel testing program through the wing-warping control system to the Wright Flyer itself. He piloted the first of the four flights the brothers made at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903, a 12-second flight of 37 meters that is internationally credited as the first sustained, controlled flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft. After Wilbur death in 1912, Orville continued to run the Wright Company and later devoted himself to aeronautical research and to defending the brothers achievement, including the long and public dispute with the Smithsonian Institution over its early preference for Samuel Langley failed Aerodrome, a dispute that kept the original 1903 Flyer on loan to a London museum for two decades before it was resolved and the aircraft returned to the United States.