Orville Wright

Orville Wright: Twelve Seconds and Forty-Five Years

He got the first turn by accident. On 14 December 1903 the brothers flipped a coin for the honour, Wilbur won, pulled up too sharply, stalled, and came down after 105 feet and three and a half seconds. Three days of repairs later it was Orville's go. On 17 December, lying prone in a hip cradle on the lower wing of a machine with a twelve-horsepower engine, he covered 120 feet in twelve seconds — the first sustained, powered, controlled flight of a heavier-than-air machine, and the one the camera happened to catch. He would live another forty-five years, and would not see that machine on public display in his own country until the year he died.

A Toy Helicopter and a Bicycle Shop

Orville was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1871, four years after Wilbur, who was born near Millville, Indiana, on 16 April 1867. Their father Milton was a bishop of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ; their mother Susan Catherine Koerner had been educated in mathematics and science. The house held two libraries. In 1878 the boys were given a small model helicopter of cork, bamboo and paper driven by a twisted rubber band, based on a design by the French pioneer Alphonse Pénaud. It is the standard origin story and it appears to be true.

Orville had a reputation for mischief. Neither brother finished high school, attended college, or married — unusual in a family where their sister Katharine did go to college. In 1889 they started a newspaper, the *West Side News*, Wilbur editing and Orville publishing; in 1892 they opened the Wright Cycle Company, repairing and then building bicycles. When the German glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal was killed in a crash in 1896, they turned their attention to flight.

The Problem Was Control

Almost everyone else working on the problem was chasing lift and power — bigger wings, stronger engines. The Wrights decided the unsolved problem was control, and specifically control about all three axes at once. Watching birds bank by twisting their wingtips, they devised wing warping: physically deforming the wing surfaces to raise one side and drop the other. They tested it in gliders at Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills from 1900.

The decisive step came in 1902, when they coupled a movable rear rudder to the wing-warping mechanism so that the two acted together, cancelling the adverse yaw that warping alone produced. Combined with a forward elevator for pitch, this gave coordinated command of roll, pitch and yaw. It was the first three-axis aircraft control system, and it is, in principle, still the one every aeroplane uses. They patented it in 1906.

The Wind Tunnel in the Bicycle Shop

In 1901 their gliders underperformed badly, and the brothers reached an alarming conclusion: the published aerodynamic tables, Lilienthal's included, were wrong. Rather than work around the problem they built a wind tunnel in the back of the bicycle shop and tested roughly two hundred wing shapes themselves, generating their own data. The 1902 glider that came out of it had a shallow camber and a high aspect ratio, both derived from measurement rather than intuition. This is the moment aeronautics stopped being a craft and became an engineering discipline.

Twelve Seconds

The 1903 Flyer spanned 40 feet 4 inches, ran 21 feet 1 inch nose to tail, carried 510 square feet of wing at a camber of one in twenty, and weighed 605 pounds empty. Their shop employee Charlie Taylor built the four-cylinder petrol engine to order: twelve horsepower, 180 pounds, turning at 1,025 rpm. It drove two 8.5-foot propellers in opposite directions to cancel torque, through bicycle chains from the Indianapolis Chain Company at a 23-to-8 reduction — because the brothers had worked out that a propeller is a rotating wing and that slower, larger blades generate more thrust than a small one spun fast.

On 17 December the wind at Kill Devil Hills averaged over 20 mph, which they needed for airspeed. Helped by men from the nearby government life-saving station, they made four flights, alternating pilots: Orville 120 feet in 12 seconds, Wilbur 175 feet in 12, Orville 200 feet in 15, and finally Wilbur 852 feet in 59 seconds. None went higher than about ten feet, and none attempted a turn. The last landing broke the front elevator supports, and minutes afterward a gust flipped the machine over and wrecked it. It never flew again. Crated, it sat behind a Wright Company shed in Dayton for nine years, and spent eleven days underwater in the Great Dayton Flood of March 1913.

Fort Myer

In 1908 Orville flew demonstrations for the U.S. Army at Fort Myer, Virginia. On the final flight of the trials the aircraft crashed, killing his passenger, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge — the first fatality in a powered aeroplane — and leaving Orville with broken ribs, a fractured leg and hip damage from which he never fully recovered.

The Long Second Act

The Wright Company made them rich and neither much enjoyed it; Wilbur was president, Orville vice-president, and both preferred research to business. From 1909 they were consumed by patent litigation, chiefly against Glenn Curtiss. Wilbur died of typhoid fever on 30 May 1912, aged forty-five. Orville sold out and spent the next three decades as an elder statesman of aviation, serving on aeronautical boards and committees including the body that became NASA.

Why Orville Is Called a Genius

The quality is problem-selection, and it belongs to both brothers jointly. Powered flight in 1903 was not blocked by engines — adequate engines existed — but by the fact that nobody could keep an aircraft pointed where they wanted it. The Wrights identified that, isolated it, solved it in three axes, and then, when the published science contradicted their gliders, distrusted the science and rebuilt the dataset from scratch in a homemade wind tunnel. That combination — correctly diagnosing the real obstacle, then refusing to accept authoritative data that did not match their own results — is the whole of it. There is also a large component of pure craft: they were bicycle mechanics, and the propeller theory, the chain drive, the hip cradle and the airframe are the work of two men who were extremely good with their hands and thought in mechanisms.

The counter-case has to be stated plainly. This was a partnership, and most historians place Wilbur as the intellectual leader; Orville's turn at the controls on 17 December came about only because Wilbur had crashed on his own attempt three days earlier. In thirty-six years after Wilbur's death Orville invented nothing of comparable importance. And his conduct of the aftermath is genuinely open to criticism: the patent campaign against Curtiss is widely thought to have slowed American aviation at a critical moment, and his quarrel with the Smithsonian ran for decades. The honest summary is that Orville Wright was half of one of the most effective problem-solving partnerships in the history of technology, and that the half is still an enormous thing to have been.

Legacy

The Smithsonian had refused to exhibit the Flyer in 1910. Its secretary, Charles Walcott, promoted instead his friend Samuel Langley, whose Aerodrome had failed nine days before Kitty Hawk, and in 1914 commissioned Curtiss to modify and fly the Aerodrome in an attempt to undercut the Wright patents. Orville's response was to send the Flyer abroad: on 28 January 1928 it went to the Science Museum in London, where it held the place of honour, retreating to underground storage near Corsham during the Second World War. In 1942 a new Smithsonian secretary, Charles Abbot, published a retraction — "It is everywhere acknowledged that the Wright brothers were the first to make sustained flights in a heavier-than-air machine at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903."

Orville died on 30 January 1948 after a second heart attack. The formal handover took place in London that October; the Flyer crossed on the *Mauretania*, and went on display in Washington on 17 December 1948, forty-five years to the day after it left the sand. It hangs in the National Air and Space Museum still.

Achievements

• National Inventors Hall of Fame — 1975
• Worked as inventor, businessperson and aircraft pilot