The First Powered Flight

Wilbur and Orville Wright ran a bicycle shop at 1127 West Third Street in Dayton, Ohio. Neither had been to university; both had left school without a diploma. The shop mattered more than the biographies usually allow: a bicycle is an unstable machine that a rider learns to balance, and the brothers reasoned from it that a flying machine would be the same, something to be flown rather than something to be made stable and then merely steered. Almost every contemporary thought the opposite.

The programme began with a letter. In May 1899 Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution asking for everything it had published on human flight, explaining that he was "an enthusiast, but not a crank". The reply (pamphlets, a reading list, Octave Chanute's Progress in Flying Machines) gave them the state of the art in a fortnight's reading, and told them what was missing from it.

Otto Lilienthal's death in 1896 had made the missing piece specific. The German had flown some two thousand glides and controlled them by swinging his legs; when a gust exceeded what his body could correct, he fell. The brothers concluded that a pilot needed a control that acted on the wings themselves, not on the machine's centre of gravity.

The answer came to Wilbur in the shop, twisting an empty cardboard inner-tube box between his hands. If a biplane's wings could be warped helically (one tip raised, the other lowered) the machine would roll, and roll deliberately. A five-foot kite built in July 1899 and flown on four lines from the ground behaved exactly as the theory said it would. Everything that followed for four years was an attempt to put a man inside that idea.

They needed wind, sand and solitude. The United States Weather Bureau's records pointed to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and in September 1900 they set up camp at Kitty Hawk with a glider of 17.5 ft span. Most of that season it flew as a kite on ropes. The important discovery was postural: lying prone on the lower wing halved the drag of an upright pilot and, contrary to every expectation of the day, proved survivable in a crash.

The 1901 season nearly ended the project. The larger glider produced barely a third of the lift its designers had calculated, and worse, warping the wings occasionally swung the machine the wrong way: what would later be called adverse yaw. On the train home Wilbur said that man would not fly for a thousand years. Both brothers had realised something more useful than despair: the published figures were wrong. Lilienthal's coefficients, and John Smeaton's air-pressure constant of 1759, had been taken on trust by everyone in the field, themselves included.

So they rebuilt the foundation. In the autumn of 1901, in the back of the bicycle shop, they made a wind tunnel, a wooden box about six feet long with a fan at one end, and two exquisitely simple balances from bicycle spokes and hacksaw blades, which measured lift and drag as ratios and so cancelled out most sources of error. In roughly two months they tested some two hundred model wing shapes, several dozen of them systematically. The result was the first body of reliable aerodynamic data in existence, and it belonged to two shopkeepers in Ohio.

The 1902 glider was built to those numbers, and it flew. One problem remained: in a warped turn the machine could still slew and spin in. Orville, sleepless one night in October after too much coffee, proposed making the fixed rear fin movable; Wilbur added that it should be linked to the wing-warping cradle so the pilot commanded both together. That linkage (roll and yaw coordinated, with the forward elevator for pitch) is three-axis control, and it is the invention. The brothers made something over a thousand glides that season, some lasting 26 seconds. They went home able to fly, and needing only an engine and a propeller.

The machine of 1903 was a canard biplane of 40.32 ft span and 605 lb empty, built of spruce and ash and covered in unbleached "Pride of the West" muslin, dress fabric from a Dayton department store, sewn by the brothers. It had no wheels: two skids, and a 60 ft launching rail of two-by-four topped with a strip of steel, on which the machine ran on a small wheeled truck. It had no throttle worth the name, no instruments beyond a stopwatch, an anemometer and a revolution counter, and no seat, the pilot lay in a cradle on the lower wing and moved his hips to warp the wings.

No manufacturer would sell them an engine of eight horsepower weighing under two hundred pounds, so Charlie Taylor, the machinist who kept the bicycle business running while the brothers were away, built one in six weeks from sketches chalked on the shop wall. It was a horizontal four-cylinder of 0.9 US gal with a cast aluminium crankcase, an exotic material in 1903, and it delivered around twelve horsepower, comfortably more than the specification. It had no carburettor, no fuel pump and no spark plugs; fuel dripped into a heated manifold and the charge was fired by opening and closing contact points inside the cylinder.

The propellers were the intellectual surprise. Marine practice offered nothing usable, so the brothers reasoned that a propeller is simply a wing travelling in a helix, and applied their own wind-tunnel data to it. The two 8.5 ft blades, carved from laminated spruce and turning in opposite directions to cancel torque, were calculated to be 66 per cent efficient. Tests on accurate replicas a century later measured better than 75 per cent, a figure modern designers respect. Chains ran the drive from the single engine to both shafts, one crossed to reverse its rotation; the chains came from a bicycle supplier, in tubes to keep them from whipping.

The first attempt was made on Monday 14 December. Wilbur won the toss, launched from the slope of the big hill, pulled up too sharply and stalled into the sand after 105 ft and three and a half seconds. The brothers did not count it; the machine had not sustained itself. Repairs took two days.

Thursday the 17th was freezing, with puddles of ice on the sand and a north wind of 17–23 kt, stronger than they wanted, and they discussed waiting. They decided the wind was tolerable and, at ten o'clock, hung out the signal that brought volunteers from the Kill Devil Hills Life-Saving Station a mile away. Five men came: the surfmen John T. Daniels, Adam Etheridge and Will Dough; W. C. Brinkley, a lumber buyer from Manteo; and Johnny Moore, a teenage boy from Nags Head. This time the rail was laid on level ground, so that nobody could say the machine had been helped downhill.

At 10:35 Orville released the restraining wire. The Flyer ran about forty feet along the rail with Wilbur steadying the wingtip, lifted into the wind and flew a lurching, undulating path (the forward elevator was far too sensitive, and every correction bred the next) before touching down 120 ft from the end of the rail. Twelve seconds. The ground speed was about seven miles an hour; the airspeed near thirty-four. A man could keep pace on foot beside it, and it was nonetheless flying.

They took turns. Wilbur flew about 175 ft, Orville about 200 ft, each a little steadier than the last. Then, at about noon, Wilbur flew the fourth: 852 ft in 59 seconds, holding the machine level for over half a minute before a pitching oscillation drove a skid into the sand and cracked the elevator supports. Half a mile through the air, on a machine that had never flown before that morning.

They carried it back to camp and stood talking beside it. A gust caught the Flyer, rolled it over and over across the sand, and wrecked it. John Daniels, who had grabbed at a strut and been carried inside the tumbling wreck, emerged bruised, the first person injured in an aeroplane accident, as he liked to say afterwards. The machine never flew again.

Almost nothing happened. The Dayton Journal declined the story on the grounds that a fifty-nine-second flight was too short to be of interest. A garbled account appeared in the Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk and was reprinted in a handful of papers, most of it invented. Scientific American did not believe it for three years. The brothers, who wanted a patent before they wanted publicity, were content to be ignored.

They moved their flying to Huffman Prairie, a cow pasture eight miles from Dayton, where the wind was poor and the field was small but the streetcar ran past the gate. There, with a weight-and-derrick catapult substituting for the missing sea breeze, they turned an aeroplane that could fly straight into one that could be flown. On 20 September 1904 Wilbur completed the first full circle ever flown by a powered aircraft. In 1905 the Flyer III, the first practical aeroplane in the world, stayed up for 38 minutes and covered 21 nm, landing only when the fuel ran out.

Then they stopped flying entirely, for two and a half years, while they negotiated with governments who would not buy a machine they were not allowed to see. The silence cost them dearly in credit: in Europe the word bluffeurs was used in print. It ended on 8 August 1908 at the Hunaudières racecourse near Le Mans, where Wilbur, in front of a sceptical French crowd, made a flight of one minute forty-five seconds that included two banked circles. The scepticism collapsed in that minute. "We are as children compared with the Wrights," said Louis Blériot, who would cross the Channel eleven months later.

The same season took its price. On 17 September 1908, demonstrating the machine to the US Army at Fort Myer, Orville crashed when a propeller split; his passenger, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, became aviation's first fatality. Orville flew again, but never without pain. Wilbur died of typhoid in 1912, at forty-five, worn down by the patent litigation his invention had made inevitable.

The claim for 17 December 1903 rests on an unusually thick record for an event witnessed by seven people on an empty beach.

There is the photograph. Orville had set up the brothers' Gundlach Korona V on its tripod, framed on the end of the rail, and asked Daniels, who had never used a camera, to squeeze the bulb if anything happened. He did, at the instant the skids left the rail. The 5×7 glass plate was developed in Dayton weeks later and shows the machine a foot above the sand, Orville prone at the controls, Wilbur running at the wingtip with his hand still open. It is one of the most examined photographs ever taken, and it has never been credibly challenged.

There are the diaries. Both brothers kept dated notebooks; Orville's entry for the day records the times, the durations and the wind. There is the telegram, sent that afternoon from the Kitty Hawk weather station, mistranscribing 59 seconds as 57 and misspelling Orville's name. There are the five witnesses, all named, all locally traceable, three of them government employees who wrote up the day in the station's own log.

And there is the strongest evidence of all, which is not documentary. A hoax or a fluke does not repeat. Within two years the same brothers, with the same principles and a much-improved machine, were flying circles over an Ohio cow pasture for half an hour at a time and landing where they intended. Nobody else in the world could do that in 1905.

The longest quarrel over the first flight was fought not with a rival inventor but with a museum.

Samuel Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, had spent $50,000 of public money, most of it a War Department grant, on a manned Aerodrome that was catapulted into the Potomac twice in 1903, on 7 October and on 8 December, nine days before Kitty Hawk. Both times it collapsed on launch. In 1914 the Smithsonian lent the wreck to Glenn Curtiss, then defending himself against the Wright patent, who rebuilt it with a different wing camber, a stronger structure, new propellers and eventually a different engine, and made brief hops off Keuka Lake. The Institution then exhibited the machine with a label describing it as the first aeroplane "capable of" manned powered flight, and repeated the claim in its annual reports for years without disclosing the extent of the rebuilding.

Orville Wright's response was to refuse the Smithsonian the Flyer. In 1928 he sent it to the Science Museum in London, where it stayed for twenty years, through a war, in a bomb-proof store. Public opinion, and eventually the Institution itself, came round: in October 1942 the Smithsonian published a full account of the 1914 modifications and withdrew its claims. Orville agreed to bring the Flyer home, but died in January 1948, before it arrived.

It was installed at the Smithsonian on 17 December 1948, the forty-fifth anniversary, under a deed of gift whose conditions include an undertaking that the Institution will not state that any aircraft earlier than the 1903 Flyer was capable of carrying a man in powered, controlled flight. The clause is often described as a gag on scholarship. It is more precisely a scar: the price a museum agreed to pay for having spent a quarter of a century marking its own answer as correct.

"First" is a claim about definitions before it is a claim about dates, and the definition matters more than the arguing usually admits. The generally applied test asks for a machine that is heavier than air, carries a person, is powered, takes off from level ground under its own power, sustains itself without losing speed or height, is controlled in flight by its pilot, and lands at a point no lower than its start: and does so in a way that can be repeated and documented.

Strike any one of those conditions and the answer changes. Drop "controlled" and Ader's Éole takes the honour in 1890. Drop "from level ground under its own power" and the argument for Santos-Dumont's 14-bis, which used neither rail nor headwind, becomes strong: as Brazil maintains it is. Drop "documented" and half a dozen claimants arrive at once.

The entries below set out the principal competing claims with the evidence for each, rather than a verdict. Two things are worth holding on to while reading them. The first is that a hop and a flight are genuinely different events, and the distinction was drawn by the pioneers themselves, not invented later by partisans: the Wrights refused to count their own 14 December attempt. The second is that being first is a smaller achievement than being repeatable, and the Wrights' real claim is the second one.

The site is now the Wright Brothers National Memorial. Four numbered markers stand on the sand at the distances the machine reached that morning, and the walk from the first to the fourth takes about three minutes: which is the most eloquent exhibit there. A granite pylon on Kill Devil Hill, which was a shifting dune in 1903 and had to be stabilised with grass before anything could be built on it, carries the words "conceived by genius, achieved by dauntless resolution and unconquerable faith".

The Flyer itself hangs in the Wright Brothers gallery of the National Air and Space Museum, its 1985 recovering the fourth in its life. North Carolina's licence plates say First in Flight; Ohio's say Birthplace of Aviation; both states are stating a fact and neither is stating the whole one.

The most exact measure of what the sixty-six years after Kitty Hawk contained is a small parcel Neil Armstrong carried to the Moon in 1969: a piece of muslin from the Flyer's left wing and a splinter of wood from its left propeller. In 2021 another swatch of the same wing, the size of a postage stamp, was taped to a cable beneath NASA's Ingenuity helicopter and flown in the atmosphere of Mars. The fabric was bought over a counter in Dayton for a few cents a yard.