Wilbur and Orville Wright: A Hockey Stick, a Wind Tunnel and Kitty Hawk

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In the mid-1880s a hockey stick swung on a frozen Ohio lake knocked out Wilbur Wright's front teeth. The athletic teenager who had been headed for Yale withdrew into his father's library for years, and later went into business with his younger brother Orville. Sons of the traveling bishop Milton Wright, the brothers built their own printing press, printed a paper for their classmate Paul Laurence Dunbar, and by 1892 ran a bicycle shop in Dayton. The bicycle taught them that a machine did not need to be inherently stable if the pilot could actively balance it. After Otto Lilienthal died in a glider crash in 1896, Wilbur studied birds, twisted an inner tube box at the shop counter, and hit on wing warping.

Their 1900 and 1901 gliders at Kitty Hawk produced too little lift and suffered adverse yaw, and Wilbur told Orville humans might not fly for a thousand years. Suspecting the century-old Smeaton coefficient was wrong, they built a wind tunnel with hacksaw blades and bicycle spokes and tested more than 200 wing shapes. The 1902 glider, with a movable rudder linked to the warping cables, achieved three-axis control. On December 17, 1903, Orville flew 120 feet in 12 seconds before five witnesses. The brothers then worked in secrecy at Huffman Prairie, won a patent on their control method in 1906, and stunned skeptics at Le Mans in 1908. Patent battles with Glenn Curtiss wore Wilbur down, and he died of typhoid in 1912 at 45.

• Their father brought home a rubber-band toy helicopter designed by Alphonse Pénaud, and the boys built copies after it broke.
• Mechanic Charlie Taylor built a 12-horsepower aluminum-block engine in six weeks, and their hand-carved propellers reached about 82 percent efficiency.
• Samuel Langley spent $50,000 in public money on a machine that plunged into the Potomac, while the Wrights spent under $1,000.
• Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge was killed in a 1908 Army demonstration crash that put Orville in the hospital for seven weeks, with sister Katharine at his side.
• A swatch of muslin from the 1903 Flyer rode to Mars on the Ingenuity helicopter, whose takeoff spot NASA named Wright Brothers Field.