On the 100^th anniversary of flight, a look at the revisionist history of Wilbur and Orville Wright’s accomplishments.

Taking Flight (Cover Story)
U.S. News & World Report, 07/21/2003, 135(2) p. 39-42, 44-46, 3157 words.

How the `dropouts from Dayton' changed the world forever
Section: Special Report

Full Text: As far as the fishermen of Kitty Hawk were concerned, the city boys were a tad odd. They spent hours on the beach staring up at seagulls or running up and down the dunes with big, ungainly homemade kites. Sleeping in a tent, fighting off clouds of mosquitoes, and eating up all the eggs in town, they were always impeccably dressed in suits and ties despite the summer heat. Sure, it was 1900, and all over the country technology was changing. But flying machines? To the rural North Carolinians, it was just . . . weird.

Still, the city boys kept coming back, bringing bigger, more elaborate contraptions every year. By 1903, the Kitty Hawkers were believers, and the two men--a pair of preacher's sons from Ohio named Wilbur and Orville Wright--were (very) local celebrities. And so, on a bitterly cold December day, a handful of townsfolk skipped their chores and showed up to watch the world change forever.

Today, we can fly cross-country, even around the world, on a whim. We take it for granted today, but the Wrights' 1903 flier, nearly 700 pounds of wood, wire, muslin cloth, a sputtering homemade engine, and hand-carved propellers, may be one of the most important inventions in history. From trade to travel, war to weather, aviation has transformed civilization--and captured the human imagination like no other accomplishment.

The 100th anniversary of the Wrights' 120-foot, 12-second hop on Dec. 17, 1903, will be commemorated around the country with celebrations, re-creations of the Wright's original flier, and a bumper crop of biographies and books. But amid the hype is a serious reappraisal of the Wrights' legacy and achievement. The first flight wasn't the work of isolated, uneducated mechanics who got lucky. Instead, scholars say, they were consummate experimenters, self-educated prototypes of the modern engineer. "People need a firm understanding that Wilbur and Orville were the real inventors of the airplane in a much truer sense than Edison was the inventor of the light bulb or Bell the inventor of the telephone," says Tom Crouch, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's senior curator of aeronautics and author of The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright. "They weren't just bike makers from Dayton, Ohio. They were engineers of genius, who took a leap into the unknown to invent the airplane."

Countless dreamers before them had looked up at the sky but failed to get off the ground. "The thumbnail sketch is: Two high school dropouts who were bicycle makers from Ohio invented the airplane," says Peter Jakab, chairman of Air and Space's aeronautics division. "While that's all technically true, it really belies the real situation."

There's another story to tell, too, one buried for decades under the weight of mythology. After that glorious December morning, a darker side of Wilbur and Orville emerged: proud, stubborn, suspicious men made litigious and even paranoid by competitors eager to steal their glory and ideas. Some even suggest that the Wrights' ferocious litigation crippled the fledgling American aviation industry. Without a doubt, the Ohioans were quickly left behind in the race to improve the airplane--and very nearly left out of the history books altogether.

Before they flew. The Wrights were born into a deeply religious family. Their father was a controversial bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, fond of suing his fellow church officials. He taught his sons the outside world was a dangerous place for honest men--a troubling lesson that would come back to haunt them. It was a loving and supportive household, but not one that encouraged its two youngest sons to leave the nest.

While they were indeed "high school dropouts," Orville and his older brother completed rigorous college prep courses. Living in Dayton in the 1880s, they had access to a large home library and were encouraged to tinker and experiment. "The brothers were like computer geeks today," says Dick Hallion, author of Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age From Antiquity Through the First World War. "They were most happy sitting around thinking about problem solving. They didn't have a social life." Wilbur, by far the more outgoing one, was on the verge of starting at Yale when an ice hockey accident and other setbacks confined him to home for three years. When he recovered, he and Orville went into business as printers and bicycle makers.

Wilbur's pursuit of flight began as an early midlife crisis. At 32, he felt as though he was heading nowhere special. He and "Orv" were successful business owners and respected members of the Dayton community. Unmarried, they still lived in their father's house. "They were craving . . . some sort of intellectual challenge," says Jakab. This was no childhood obsession or flash of inspiration. "They decided to get involved in the onward march of human progress," says Rick Young, a Wright historian who has been building reproductions of their craft for decades.

Wilbur told his father shortly before setting off for his first summer at Kitty Hawk in 1900 that flight "is almost the only great problem which has not been pursued by a multitude of investigators, and therefore carried to a point where further progress is very difficult." Long before they flew a single glider, Wilbur's confidence sounds like hubris. "It is my belief that flight is possible," he wrote, "and while I am taking up the investigation for pleasure rather than profit, I think there is a slight possibility of achieving fame and fortune from it."

It was a time of stunning creative ferment. "No other nation has displayed such inventive power . . . as the United States during the half century beginning around 1870," writes historian Thomas Hughes in American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm. American inventors gave the world electric light, the assembly line, the automobile, the telephone, and the airplane during an age of widespread technological optimism.

The dream. Aviators had been flying balloons and blimps since 1783, but heavier-than-air flight "was seen as the pursuit of charlatans," says Jim Tobin, author of To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight. "The idea of human flight was the `standard of impossibility.' " Yet the dream was too compelling to ignore. As early as 1804, Englishman George Cayley had identified three areas for future experimenters to struggle with: the need for lift to get off the ground, propulsion to move once in the air, and control to stay aloft.

Those who took up Cayley's challenge were hampered by narrow thinking. Focused on getting off the ground or moving through the air, they failed to see the problem of flight as a whole. The results were discouraging: Earthbound contraptions like a 4-ton, steam-powered biplane or absurdist gliders based on bat wings.

The most promising of the pre-Wright experimenters was a brilliant German named Otto Lilienthal, who made almost 2,000 glider flights in the 1890s. His data on wings and lift were a steppingstone for the Wrights. But Lilienthal had no real means of controlling his craft and came to a tragic end in 1896 when a sudden gust of wind stalled his glider and sent him plummeting 50 feet to the ground.

Not all the early experimenters were European. One of the most formidable figures in aviation was Samuel Langley, head of the powerful Smithsonian Institution. With a $50,000 grant from the War Department, Langley built the Great Aerodrome, a 48-foot-wide behemoth that looked like a mechanical dragonfly and collapsed as soon as it was catapulted off a houseboat. The Aerodrome's plunge into the Potomac, just days before the Wrights' successful flight, virtually killed the credibility of heavier-than-air flight.

As Langley prepared his Aerodrome in the public eye, the Wrights were toiling quietly on their own gliders in Dayton and on the beaches of the Outer Banks. They were in the right place at the right time. The brand-new internal combustion engine was driving innovations around the country. Like the microchip decades later, the internal combustion engine "was a single invention of enormous promise and possibility that led to any number of young inventors' trying their luck," says Tom Heppenheimer, author of First Flight: The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane. The new technology finally offered a lightweight solution to the problem of aircraft propulsion.

Orville and Wilbur were cut from a different cloth than their competition. "The Wrights are the prototypes of the modern aeronautical engineer," Hallion says. "They didn't build some contraption and see what happened. Instead, they broke the problem down and tried to solve it in parts." Their first step was to find out what had been discovered so far. Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution in 1899 with a modestly worded request: "I am an enthusiast, but not a crank. . . . I wish to avail myself of all that is already known and then if possible add my mite to help on the future worker who will attain final success."

The first years of experimentation ended in frustration and failure. A mosquito-plagued summer spent flying kites and a small, unmanned glider encouraged them to return to Kitty Hawk in 1901 with a full-size version. It was a disaster. "In 1901 they should have been called the Wrong brothers," Young says. "They had everything wrong but their approach." With a primitive control system, the glider was prone to crash and nearly impossible to control. Wilbur told his younger brother on the train ride back to Dayton that "men would not fly for 50 years."

They were soon back at the drawing board, this time building a wind tunnel. The 6-foot box was revolutionary: the first device to "obtain aerodynamic data in a form that could be incorporated directly into the design of an actual aircraft," writes Jakab in Visions of a Flying Machine. Within just three months, their methodical experiments with hundreds of wing shapes yielded the crucial result: Lilienthal's tables were off. They were now far past any competitors, and the next summer was thrilling. "Our new machine is a very great improvement over anything we had built before and over anything anyone has built," Wilbur wrote from Kitty Hawk in 1902. "We now believe that the flying problem is really nearing its solution." The 1902 glider carried them hundreds of feet on more than 700 flights.

Unsafe at any speed? While most experimenters focused on building planes that were stable in the air, unwilling to trust the pilot to control them, the Wrights realized early that--like the bicycles back in their Dayton shop--a flying machine could be inherently unstable and at the same time inherently controllable. Their 1902 glider moved on three axes--up and down, side to side, and tilting--and incorporated all the essential design elements found on airplanes today. Young, who has been building and flying reproductions of the Wright gliders for three decades, likens controlling them to riding a bicycle very, very slowly. "I can't say it's safe," he says. The unstable design and tremendously sensitive controls mean any mistakes are rapidly magnified. "You have to stay very much ahead. If it gets ahead of you, you can't catch up."

As they turned their successful glider into a powered craft, the brothers displayed typical glee at solving the thorny problems--from having to build an engine from scratch to literally inventing the modern propeller--that came up at every turn. "Unable to find anything of value in any of the works to which we had access . . . we worked out a theory of our own on the subject," Orville wrote. "Isn't it astonishing that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so that we could discover them!!"

They left for one more Kitty Hawk expedition in the fall of 1903. Samuel Langley's Great Aerodrome had crashed just days before. If a famous scientist at the country's leading research institute couldn't make it work, what hope did two boys from Dayton have? "Langley has had his fling," Orville wrote after hearing the news. "It seems to be our turn to throw now, and I wonder what our luck will be."

At 10:35 a.m. on December 17, Orville took the controls and guided the flier 120 feet down the beach. It was the first true powered flight in history. Their last flight of the day proved their accomplishment was no fluke: Wilbur flew 852 feet, nearly the length of three football fields, and spent 59 seconds in the air.

It would take two years of tinkering to refine the 1903 flier into a practical airplane. "They were really nervous," Crouch says. "They thought somebody was going to steal their secret. So they stopped flying." All their attention turned to making money from their invention. And that's when the trouble started. Initially, the brothers were uninterested in business. Sure that only governments would have any use for their device, they offered the War Department a curious deal. If the government would sign a contract sight unseen, they would provide an airplane. The Army would just have to take their word.

Their word wasn't good enough. Yes, the Army brass had been interested in aviation--until they watched Langley drop $50,000 in taxpayer money into the Potomac. That "got them in so much hot water with Congress they didn't want to get burned again," Crouch says. The Wrights took the government's doubts personally and resolved to take their invention elsewhere. And news of their successes had already leaked out. Using a rough conception of the Wrights' design, French experimenters were stumbling into the air by 1906. "By 1907 and 1908 these guys truly are flying, without the control the Wright brothers had and taking enormous risks," Crouch says. "They all assumed they were the first--after all, if these Americans had really done all they claimed, why weren't they flying?"

Bons mots. The Wrights' refusal to demonstrate their flier in public made their competitors increasingly dubious. "They are in fact either fliers or liars," one newspaper in France wrote. "It is difficult to fly. It is easy to say, `We have flown.' " In Paris, the Dayton boys were dismissed as bluffeurs.

Finally, in 1908, they managed to persuade the U.S. Army and the French government to buy the rights to their flier. Wilbur left for France alone, under pressure to finally prove the claims of the past five years. On Aug. 8, 1908, he took to the air. Flying figure eights and banked turns with ease, Wilbur stunned the crowds. "The facility with which the machine flies . . . [has] completely dissipated all doubts," one French enthusiast wrote. "Not one of the former Wright detractors dare question, today, the previous experiments of the men who were truly the first to fly." A French aviator summed it up: "Nous sommes battus [We are beaten]."

But a glimpse of the Wrights' design was enough for their many competitors. "The Europeans aren't learning from the Wright experience how to fly; they're learning how to fly better," says Hallion. "Even those who bought the Wrights' licenses very quickly abandoned them, not because they stripped them of their secrets but because they were very dangerous machines." Of the nine pilots recruited as an exhibition team to demonstrate their planes in 1910, five died in crashes.

Still, the Wrights saw many of their basic breakthroughs incorporated into the airplanes of their competitors. One of the most infuriating was Glenn "Fastest Man in the World" Curtiss, a daredevil motorcyclist who had been involved in American aviation since 1900. Curtiss was using Wright innovations to win international prizes and sell planes, all without paying the Wrights.

They took him to court. "The Wrights were so litigious they'd file a lawsuit against an air show if a plane was flying that violated their patents," Heppenheimer says. Soon, instead of improving their planes and advancing flight, the brothers found themselves consumed by legal battles in America, France, and England. "Defending their rights took time and energy and resources," says Dennis Parks, a senior curator at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. "All that took them away from their inventions."

Dirty tricks. When courts sided with the Wrights, their competitors got nasty. Portraying them as greedy monopolists, Curtiss and the French started to deny the Wrights had been the first to fly, hoping to invalidate their patent. Curtiss even pulled Langley's Great Aerodrome out of storage, overhauling it and getting it airborne briefly. The claim that Langley was first began a bitter feud between the Wrights and the Smithsonian that lasted for decades. Finally, the Smithsonian acknowledged their achievement in 1942.

Hallion and others argue the suits had a chilling effect on American aviation, discouraging people from getting into the business and letting Europeans race ahead. Wright defenders point out that Curtiss and others were making money hand over fist even as the lawsuits dragged on. The truth may be somewhere in between. "The lawsuits hurt the Wrights more than . . . the industry," says Parks.

For Wilbur, it all proved to be too much. By 1912, he was on the road or overseas constantly, testifying or talking to lawyers. The tremendous strain eventually caught up with him, and he died of typhoid fever on May 30, 1912, at age 45. Orville, left alone to manage the business and the lawsuits, was overwhelmed.

"The Wrights won every battle but lost the war," Crouch says. "By the time it's done, Curtiss is on top of the airplane world, and the Wrights are out of the business or dead. The Europeans rushed right past us." By the time the United States entered the First World War, its pilots had to fly French or British planes because American technology was inadequate.

In a decade, the nation that invented the aerial age had been left behind. It took the shock of World War I and years of concerted government and private investment to get American aviation back on track. Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in an American plane in 1927; 10 years later U.S. carriers flew 1.2 million passengers. With the beginning of World War II and the decades that followed, the descendants of the Wrights' frail flier would make flight possible for the masses and take us beyond the speed of sound, to the moon, into the atomic age--and beyond.