How Much Do You Know About the Wright Brothers?

The Wright brothers pioneered aeronautical engineering techniques, including the use of a wind tunnel for collecting aerodynamic data for constructing aircraft. The wind tunnel experiments allowed the inventors to fine-tune their designs for maximum efficiency. Modern aircraft design still makes use of wind tunnels, using data collection methods first pioneered by the Wright brothers.

As a child in Ohio, Orville Wright was a classmate of Paul Laurence Dunbar, a central figure in 20th-century African American literature. Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy” features the line “I know why the caged bird sings,” which Maya Angelou chose as the title for her classic autobiography. The Wright brothers also printed Dunbar’s newspaper, the “Dayton Tattler,” written for the city’s Black community.

The crew of the Apollo 14 lunar mission named their spacecraft’s command module “Kitty Hawk” in honor of the Wright brothers’ contributions to the field of aviation. The Kitty Hawk module orbited the moon with astronaut Stuart Roosa on board while his crewmates Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell explored the lunar surface. The Kitty Hawk module is currently on display at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

While modern commercial airliners regularly travel thousands of miles in a single flight, the Wright brothers’ first flight was very short by comparison. It lasted just 12 seconds and covered only 120 feet — a distance shorter than the wingspan of a Boeing 747.

The capabilities of the original Wright Flyer were quite modest by today’s aviation standards. It could only reach a maximum speed of approximately 30 mph, and the top speed reached during the historic first flight at Kitty Hawk was a mere 6.8 mph. Today, the average commercial airplane flies close to 600 mph, and the current world record for the fastest recorded airplane speed is 2,100 mph.

The Wright Brothers National Memorial in North Carolina features an image of Icarus, the figure from Greek mythology who flew using a pair of artificial wings. According to legend, Icarus flew too high and the sun melted the wax that held his wings together, causing him to fall to his death. His inclusion on the memorial serves as a reminder of humanity’s long, dangerous quest to achieve flight.

The Wright brothers were Ohio natives, and the Ohio state quarter pays homage to the inventors by featuring an image of the Wright Flyer III, an improved version of the first Wright Flyer. The North Carolina state quarter features an image of the original Wright Flyer making the world’s first powered flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

In April 2021, NASA successfully piloted a small robotic helicopter named “Ingenuity” on Mars. This was the first powered, controlled flight to take place on another planet, and NASA named the area on Mars where the flight had taken place “Wright Brothers Field” as a tribute to the brothers’ historic flight on Earth more than a century earlier.

While previous aeronautic engineers had attempted to create airplanes that steered by shifting the weight of the entire aircraft, the Wright Brothers developed a technique called “wing warping,” which steered the aircraft by twisting the tips of the wings. Wing warping allowed a pilot to maneuver an airplane in three dimensions with a much higher degree of precision than earlier methods.

The Wright brothers owned and operated the Wright Cycle Company, a shop that built and repaired bicycles. Their work with bicycles taught them lessons about physics and design that they were able to apply to their aviation work. After the success of the Wright Flyer, the brothers founded the Wright Company, which was dedicated exclusively to manufacturing airplanes.

Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks contain extensive sketches of a flying machine he invented called an “ornithopter.” The Renaissance polymath based the design of the ornithopter on his studies of how birds flew. The ornithopter flew by flapping large mechanical wings controlled by the aviator. Though Leonardo’s machine was never built, his work inspired the Wright brothers centuries later.

When Neil Armstrong traveled to the moon on the Apollo 11 mission, he brought with him a piece of fabric from the wing of the original Wright Flyer, as well as a piece of wood from one of the plane’s propellers. The 1969 moon landing occurred just 65 years after the Wrights’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, and stood as a testament to just how far the science of aviation had progressed in that time.

The Wright brothers completed the world’s first motor-powered airplane flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903. They chose the city because it provided expansive, wide-open spaces free of obstructions, as well as predictable, steady winds. Kitty Hawk was also home to many large sand dunes, which provided the Wrights with soft terrain for safer landings.

The Wright Flyer was the name of the aircraft that made the first motor-powered, heavier-than-air flight in human history. After the plane’s history-making flight on December 17, 1903, it sustained significant damage and never flew again. Still, the original Wright Flyer survives to this day, and is currently on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Orville and Wilbur Wright were born and raised in Dayton, Ohio. Wilbur was born on April 16, 1867, and Orville was born on August 19, 1871. Neither brother attended college, and Orville did not graduate high school. Nevertheless, through self-education and skilled research, they went on to invent the world’s first motor-powered airplane and spark a new era of aviation.