Engineers
Wilbur Wright
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Wilbur Wright, with his younger brother Orville, ran a bicycle repair and manufacturing business in Dayton, Ohio, before turning its mechanical and business skills to powered flight. The brothers built their own wind tunnel in 1901 to test more than two hundred wing shapes after finding published aerodynamic tables unreliable, and developed wing warping, a system of cables that twisted the wingtips to bank and steer the aircraft, solving the problem of lateral control that had defeated other flight experimenters of the period. On December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the Wright Flyer made the first sustained, controlled flights of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft, with Orville piloting the first flight and Wilbur the longest of the day, 260 meters in 59 seconds. The brothers later fought an extended and often bitter patent battle over wing-warping and aileron control against other aviation pioneers, most prominently Glenn Curtiss, a dispute this atlas records as part of the field own honest character alongside the separately recorded international priority dispute over the Wright Flyer own claim to the first powered flight.
Facts
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The brothers worked as an inseparable team through every stage of designing, building and testing the Wright Flyer.
In Field
Invented
Sources
1. A History of Technology
Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall and Trevor I. Williams, editors, Oxford University Press, 1954
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.In Field: Aerospace Engineering
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Invented: The Airplane
Brazilian historians and much of the Brazilian public credit Alberto Santos-Dumont 14-bis flight of November 12, 1906, in Paris, as the true first powered flight, not the Wright brothers December 1903 flight at Kitty Hawk. The argument rests on how each flight was made: Santos-Dumont 14-bis took off unaided under its own power from level ground in full public view and landed under control, while the Wright Flyer left the ground from a launching rail using a catapult-assisted takeoff into a headwind and was witnessed by a small group on a remote beach, with the Wright brothers themselves not releasing clear photographic and eyewitness documentation for some time afterward. This dissent does not contest that the Wright brothers flew first by date; it contests whether the December 1903 flight meets the same unaided, self-contained standard of powered flight that Santos-Dumont indisputably met three years later, and it remains the standard account taught in Brazil and reflected in French aviation historiography.
A dissenting reading, from Brazilian aeronautical historiography and the Santos-Dumont priority claimEncyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.