Orville Wright

Their father brought a toy home in 1878, a foot-long contraption of paper, bamboo and cork with a twisted rubber band for a motor, and the boys flew it until it broke and then built copies. That part of the legend is true. What followed was duller. Their mother Susan, who made her children's toys and household appliances herself and whom both brothers consulted on mechanical questions, sickened with tuberculosis and died on July 4, 1889. That year Orville quit high school after his junior year and built himself a printing press. He and Wilbur put out the West Side News from March 1890 and a daily that lasted four months. In December 1892 they opened a bicycle repair shop, and by 1896 were making their own machines.

Everyone else was building engines. The Wrights built something a pilot could steer and hung an engine on it afterward. In the autumn of 1901 they tested about 200 model wings in a wind tunnel they made themselves, because the published lift tables everybody trusted were wrong, and out of that came the 1902 glider: wing-warping for roll, a forward elevator for pitch, and a movable rear rudder whose real job was to hold the machine straight through the bank. They applied for the patent on March 23, 1903. At 10:35 on the morning of December 17 that year, at Kill Devil Hills, Orville flew 120 feet in 12 seconds. The school they later ran at Huffman Prairie trained 115 pilots, one of them Henry Arnold, who commanded American air forces in the next world war.

On September 17, 1908, at Fort Myer, a propeller split at about 100 feet and the machine went out of control. Orville came down with a broken left leg and four broken ribs. Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, riding as the Army's observer, died that evening, the first person killed in an airplane crash. X-rays 12 years later found three hip fractures nobody had caught, and he hurt for the rest of his life. Wilbur died of typhoid on May 30, 1912, at 45, and Orville was convinced the patent war against Glenn Curtiss had ground him down to it. Then in 1926 Katharine, the sister who had sat by his hospital bed for seven weeks, married an Oberlin classmate. He called it a betrayal, skipped the wedding, and stopped speaking to her until she was dying.

He spent 20 years fighting a museum. The Smithsonian was displaying Samuel Langley's Aerodrome as the first machine capable of manned flight, without disclosing how thoroughly Glenn Curtiss had rebuilt it to get it airborne in 1914, so in 1928 Orville shipped the 1903 Flyer to London rather than hand it over. Charles Lindbergh tried to broker a peace and could not. The Smithsonian published the list of modifications and withdrew its claims in 1942. Orville died of a second heart attack in Dayton on January 30, 1948, without ever seeing the airplane again. His executors sold it to the Smithsonian for one dollar, and it went on display that December 17, 45 years to the day.

Orville Wright's life against the full span of the corpus.

• West Side News other
  A Dayton weekly printed on a press he built himself, Orville publishing and Wilbur editing 1890
• Wright Cycle Company company
  The bicycles that paid for the gliders 1896
• 1902 Wright Glider invention
  Three-axis control. Some historians count this, not the 1903 machine, as the invention of the airplane. 1902
• Wright Flyer invention
  First flown December 17, 1903. It never flew again after a gust flipped it that afternoon. 1903
• U.S. Patent 821,393, Flying Machine patent
  Applied for March 23, 1903, granted May 22, 1906, and litigated for a decade 1906
• The Wright Company company
  Incorporated November 22, 1909. Orville took the presidency after Wilbur died and sold out in 1915. 1909

• 1878 aged ~7 Their father brings home a rubber-band helicopter Paper, bamboo and cork, about a foot long. They flew it until it broke, then built their own.
• July 4, 1889 aged 17 His mother dies of tuberculosis, and he leaves school the same year Susan Koerner Wright built her children's toys and was the brothers' first source of mechanical advice.
• December 1892 aged 21 The brothers open a bicycle repair shop in Dayton
• December 17, 1903 aged 32 Flies 120 feet in 12 seconds at Kill Devil Hills The first of four flights that day. Wilbur's fourth covered 852 feet in 59 seconds.
• September 17, 1908 aged 37 A propeller splits at Fort Myer and Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge is killed Orville broke a leg and four ribs. The hip fractures were not found for 12 years.
• May 30, 1912 aged 40 Wilbur dies of typhoid fever at 45 Orville and Katharine blamed the strain of the patent litigation against Glenn Curtiss.
• May 13, 1918 aged 46 Makes his last flight as a pilot, in a 1911 Model B
• 1928 aged ~57 Sends the 1903 Flyer to London rather than give it to the Smithsonian He never saw it again.
• January 30, 1948 aged 76 Dies of a second heart attack in Dayton at 76 He had lived from the horse-and-buggy age into the year of supersonic flight.

• Wilbur Wright 1867–1912
  Co-inventor of the first successful powered airplane and pioneer of aeronautical engineering. brother and partner
• Charles Lindbergh 1902–1974
  Aviator who made the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927. tried to mediate the Smithsonian fight
• Alexander Graham Bell 1847–1922
  Inventor of the telephone and founder of AT&T, transforming global communication. his association reopened the aileron question
• Henry Ford 1863–1947
  Industrialist who revolutionized manufacturing with the assembly line and made automobiles affordable. preserved the shop and the house
• Amelia Earhart 1897–1937
  Aviation pioneer and the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. flew what he started