Wilbur Wright

Wilbur Wright: The Man Who Solved Control

Four flights were made at Kitty Hawk on the morning of 17 December 1903. Orville took the first, twelve seconds and 120 feet. Wilbur took the fourth and longest: fifty-nine seconds, 852 feet. But the decisive work had been done two years earlier in a shed in Dayton, where the brothers built a wind tunnel and discovered that a coefficient the entire field had trusted for over a century was wrong.

A Hockey Stick, and the Years That Followed

Wilbur Wright was born on 16 April 1867 at Millville, Indiana, the son of Milton Wright, a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, and Susan Catherine Koerner Wright. Church business kept the family moving until they settled for good in Dayton, Ohio, in 1884.

Then a small accident redirected everything. In late 1885 or early 1886 a hockey stick caught him in the face during a game on the ice and took out his front teeth. The physical damage healed; the rest did not. He withdrew, gave up his plan to attend Yale, and spent years largely at home, nursing his terminally ill mother and reading his way through his father's library. He worried openly about his own lack of ambition. In hindsight the period looks less like a derailment than an unstructured graduate education.

The brothers went into printing around 1889, launching the weekly *West Side News* with Wilbur as editor, and in December 1892 opened the Wright Cycle Company. Bicycles funded the aeroplanes. In May 1899 Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian for everything it had on flight. His biographer James Tobin put the partnership's asymmetry plainly: it is impossible to imagine Orville, bright as he was, supplying the driving force that started their work.

The Problem Nobody Else Was Solving

Every serious rival was chasing power, on the assumption that a big enough engine would solve flight. Wilbur decided the unsolved problem was control, and that an aircraft nobody could steer was not an aircraft. He got the answer from birds, noticing that they changed the angle of the ends of their wings to roll their bodies left or right — and then, idly twisting a long inner-tube box in the bicycle shop, saw how to build it. Wing-warping meant twisting the tips of the wings in opposite directions by control lines, rather than throwing the pilot's body weight about as earlier experimenters had.

The Smithsonian's assessment is that this integrated view is exactly what set them apart: where competitors attacked isolated problems, the Wrights understood that control, lift and propulsion all had to be solved together, as one system.

The Wind Tunnel

The gliders of 1900 and 1901 underperformed their predicted lift, and rather than adjust the machine the brothers audited the mathematics. Between October and December 1901 they ran preliminary tests on as many as 200 model wing shapes, using purpose-built instruments called balances to measure lift and drag. They were the first people to use a wind tunnel to generate data used directly in designing an aircraft.

The results were heretical. Otto Lilienthal's published coefficients, the standard of the field, were wrong. So was Smeaton's coefficient, accepted for more than a hundred years at 0.005; the Wrights calculated 0.0033, and modern aerodynamicists have confirmed that figure as very accurate. In three months two bicycle mechanics with no scientific training rebuilt the empirical foundation of aeronautics.

The last piece came in 1902. Orville worked out a new vertical rudder; Wilbur grasped what it was really for. It was not for steering the way a boat's rudder steers, but for coordinating a turn — keeping the aircraft aligned while it banked. Wing-warping, elevator and movable rudder together produced true three-axis control, and every aircraft since has used it.

Kitty Hawk, and the Circle at Huffman Prairie

The 1903 Flyer cost about $1,000 and was made of spruce and muslin, carrying a twelve-horsepower four-cylinder engine that their shop mechanic Charlie Taylor fabricated in six weeks, driving two pusher propellers. Wilbur had deliberately designed for pilot control rather than inherent stability, and a 1985 analysis by Fred E. C. Culick concluded that the machine was so unstable as to be nearly unmanageable by anyone but the Wrights themselves, who had trained on the 1902 glider.

The real proof came later, at Huffman Prairie near Dayton. On 20 September 1904 Wilbur flew the first complete circle in history by a manned, powered, heavier-than-air machine. By the autumn of 1905 the Flyer III was making sustained circuits of more than twenty-four miles.

Le Mans, 1908

Europe did not believe any of it. The French press summarised the position as "Flyers or liars?" Wilbur sailed over and, from 8 August 1908, flew demonstrations at Le Mans. His effortless banking turns stunned onlookers, Louis Blériot among them. The retractions were immediate and unreserved: Georges Besançon of *L'Aérophile* wrote that the flights had completely dissipated all doubts, and Ernest Archdeacon, who had publicly mocked the brothers as bluffers, conceded that they were today hallowed in France.

The Patent War

On 22 May 1906 the brothers received US Patent 821,393 for their control system, and Wilbur spent the rest of his life defending it. When Glenn Curtiss produced ailerons that worked on the same principle, Wilbur wrote to tell him that claim 14 specifically covered the combination he was using. From 1910 he travelled incessantly to consult lawyers and give testimony in what he regarded as a moral cause, serving as president of the Wright Company.

The cost was severe and largely self-inflicted. The litigation made the brothers look greedy, and it froze development: by 1911 Wright aircraft were considered inferior to European machines, and when the United States entered the war in 1917 it had no acceptable aeroplane of its own design.

Why Wilbur Is Called a Genius

The case is specific and it is intellectual. First, he identified the binding constraint correctly when nearly everyone else got it wrong — the problem was control, not power. Second, and rarer, he was willing to disbelieve authoritative data and go and re-measure it. Discarding Lilienthal's numbers took confidence; overturning Smeaton's coefficient, unquestioned for a century, took something closer to nerve, and he was right to three decimal places. Third, he had the conceptual reach to see what a component was for: Orville built the vertical rudder, but Wilbur recognised it as the missing element of coordinated turning, which is the step that converted three separate gadgets into one control system still in universal use. The Smithsonian's judgement is that the Wrights' research techniques, innate skills and personality traits combined in a unique way that explains why they succeeded where so many failed.

Two honest deductions. This was a partnership, and the mythology of Wilbur as sole author does violence to it — Orville designed the rudder, Charlie Taylor built the engine, Orville flew first at Kitty Hawk. And Wilbur's judgement outside the workshop was poor. He spent his last years as a litigant rather than an engineer, in a patent campaign that damaged his reputation, stalled American aviation and left the country without a competitive aircraft when it needed one. The mind that solved flight then spent itself protecting the paperwork.

Legacy

He said he did not have time for both a wife and an aeroplane, and neither brother married. Wilbur died on 30 May 1912, aged forty-five, of typhoid fever contracted during the endless travel his lawsuits required; Orville and their sister Katharine held Curtiss partly responsible for his early death. He did not live to see the patent fight resolved. What he left is not a machine but a method — systematic testing, custom instrumentation and a refusal to take published figures on trust — and three axes of control that every aircraft flying today still obeys.

Achievements

• National Inventors Hall of Fame
• Gold Medal of the Royal Aeronautical Society
• National Aviation Hall of Fame
• Recorded as aircraft pilot, businessperson and inventor