Reference
- Wright Brothers: Credo ReferenceAmerican airplane inventors and aviation pioneers. Orville Wright 1871–1948, was born in Dayton, Ohio, and Wilbur Wright, 1867–1912, near New Castle, Ind. Their interest in aviation was aroused in the 1890s by the German engineer Otto Lilienthal's glider flights. Excellent mechanics, the Wrights used the facilities of the bicycle repair shop and factory which they operated (1892–1904) at Dayton for the construction of their early aircraft. By experimenting with movable portions of the wing assembly, rather than shifts in bodily weight, as a means of correcting the aircraft's position in flight they made an important improvement in aircraft design. During this period they also drew up valuable tables of wind pressure and drift. An engine was designed by Orville, and they constructed and attached it to their improved glider.
Streaming Media
- 1903—Kitty Hawk and Powered FlightWitness the dawning of the air age and meet the Montgolfier brothers, the Wright brothers, and others who brought humanity’s dream of flying to fruition. Then, explore how aviation shaped the experience of modernity, from the relative ease of travel to the stark reality of “total warfare.”
- Aviation - The "Wright" Time for FlightThe story of aviation has one of the most important lessons in understanding great inventions - that social or political circumstances are as important for an invention's success as the technology itself. Trace the development of aviation from the Wright brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk through the jet age.
- Legends of Air Power: The Wright BrothersViewed from the distance of nearly a century, the Wright Brothers don’t seem as heroic as they really were. They had funny names and wore three-piece suits to the beach. To the modern eye, they look more like comedians than leading men. But they invented the science of aeronautics, thinking in three dimensions when the rest of the world couldn’t move beyond two. They made human flight possible, and every aircraft that has ever flown owes something to their work.
- Taking FlightExperience the birth of aviation when two bicycle repairmen from Ohio took off from a beach near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Discover what experiments in flight preceded the Wright brothers (including lighter-than-air zeppelins) and look at the effect aviation had in the years leading up to World War I.
Perspectives
The Wright Brothers
#1 New York Times bestseller Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize David McCullough tells the dramatic story-behind-the-story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly: Wilbur and Orville Wright. On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio changed history. But it would take the world some time to believe what had happened: the age of flight had begun, with the first heavier-than-air, powered machine carrying a pilot. Who were these men and how was it that they achieved what they did? David McCullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tells the surprising, profoundly American story of Wilbur and Orville Wright. Far more than a couple of unschooled Dayton bicycle mechanics who happened to hit on success, they were men of exceptional courage and determination, and of far-ranging intellectual interests and ceaseless curiosity, much of which they attributed to their upbringing. The house they lived in had no electricity or indoor plumbing, but there were books aplenty, supplied mainly by their preacher father, and they never stopped reading. When they worked together, no problem seemed to be insurmountable. Wilbur was unquestionably a genius. Orville had such mechanical ingenuity as few had ever seen. That they had no more than a public high school education, little money and no contacts in high places, never stopped them in their "mission" to take to the air. Nothing did, not even the self-evident reality that every time they took off in one of their contrivances, they risked being killed. In this thrilling book, master historian David McCullough draws on the immense riches of the Wright Papers, including private diaries, notebooks, scrapbooks, and more than a thousand letters from private family correspondence to tell the human side of the Wright Brothers' story, including the little-known contributions of their sister, Katharine, without whom things might well have gone differently for them.
Birdmen
From acclaimed historian Lawrence Goldstone comes a thrilling narrative of courage, determination, and competition: the story of the intense rivalry that fueled the rise of American aviation. The feud between this nation's great air pioneers, the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss, was a collision of unyielding and profoundly American personalities. On one side, a pair of tenacious siblings who together had solved the centuries-old riddle of powered, heavier-than-air flight. On the other, an audacious motorcycle racer whose innovative aircraft became synonymous in the public mind with death-defying stunts. For more than a decade, they battled each other in court, at air shows, and in the newspapers. The outcome of this contest of wills would shape the course of aviation history--and take a fearsome toll on the men involved. Birdmen sets the engrossing story of the Wrights' war with Curtiss against the thrilling backdrop of the early years of manned flight, and is rich with period detail and larger-than-life personalities: Thomas Scott Baldwin, or "Cap't Tom" as he styled himself, who invented the parachute and almost convinced the world that balloons were the future of aviation; John Moisant, the dapper daredevil who took to the skies after three failed attempts to overthrow the government of El Salvador, then quickly emerged as a celebrity flyer; and Harriet Quimby, the statuesque silent-film beauty who became the first woman to fly across the English Channel. And then there is Lincoln Beachey, perhaps the greatest aviator who ever lived, who dazzled crowds with an array of trademark twists and dives--and best embodied the romance with death that fueled so many of aviation's earliest heroes. A dramatic story of unimaginable bravery in the air and brutal competition on the ground, Birdmen is at once a thrill ride through flight's wild early years and a surprising look at the personal clash that fueled America's race to the skies.
The Wright Brothers
The first powered, sustained, and controlled airplane flight, and the men behind it. A Newbery honor Book.
Online Resources
- Flying bicycles: How the Wright brothers invented the airplaneThis paper explores the ways in which Wilbur and Orville Wright thought as they tackled the problem of designing and constructing a heavier-than-air craft that would fly under its own power and under their control. It argues that their use of analogy and their use of knowledge in diagnostic reasoning lies outside the scope of current psychological theories and their computer implementations. They used analogies based on mental models of one system, such as the wings, to help them to develop theories of another system, such as the propellers. They were also skilled reasoners, who were adept at finding counterexamples to arguments.
- Innovation in the Absence of Principled Knowledge: The Case of the Wright BrothersAlthough the Wright Brothers are most famous for achieving the first successful manned powered flight, their innovation that had a revolutionary effect on airplane design was a plane capable of making banked turns. Yet this appears to have been an unintended by‐product of their effort to maximize control, in contrast to the efforts of competitors to maximize stability. The success of the Wright Brothers in this effort can be attributed to their taking an approach that was on one hand well adapted to the low state of aeronautical knowledge existing at the time but that on the other hand was committed to the construction and pursuit of principled knowledge. This involved the use of analogies, not as a source of problem solutions but as an aid in developing theory‐like principles. It also involved sequences of increasingly realistic experiments. Their approach contrasts with that of J.P. Langley, who took what has become a traditional R&D or ‘theory‐into‐practice’ approach, dependent on a high level of principled knowledge. This history yields several suggestions, not radical in themselves, about how radical advances may be made in knowledge‐poor fields, which are still common today, especially in the human sciences.
- The Wright Brothers[...]while most people know the basic story of these two brothers from Ohio who are credited with inventing and building the world's first airplane, The Wright Brothers by David McCullough provides a much more personal and comprehensive account of their story. Author, historian and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, McCullough painstakingly researched the Wright brothers including delving into a vast collection of private diaries, notebooks, scrapbooks, and more than one thousand letters from private family correspondence.