Wilbur Wright

He was the best student in the house and the one who never graduated. A family move in 1884 cost him his diploma, and then, during an ice game in the winter of 1885, a boy named Oliver Crook Haugh swung a stick into his face and took out his front teeth. The injury healed. What followed did not: Yale was dropped, and Wilbur spent roughly three years indoors, reading through his father's library and nursing his mother through the tuberculosis that killed her in 1889. He came out of that house at 22 with a printing press he and Orville had built themselves, and in 1892 the brothers opened a bicycle shop.

On May 30, 1899, he wrote the Smithsonian asking for everything it had published on flight, and by July he had built a biplane kite whose wings he could twist from the ground with four strings. That warping was the whole idea: control the machine by rolling it, the way a bird banks, instead of trying to build something that could not tip. The brothers flew gliders at Kitty Hawk in 1900, 1901 and 1902. When the published lift tables failed them, they built a six-foot wind tunnel in the back of the shop and tested dozens of miniature wings, correcting figures the entire field had trusted. On December 17, 1903, Orville went up first — 120 feet in 12 seconds. Wilbur flew the fourth and last of the day: 852 feet in 59 seconds.

From 1910 he was mostly a plaintiff. The brothers held a patent, granted May 22, 1906, on the control of a flying machine, and Wilbur concluded that Glenn Curtiss and everyone else building ailerons owed them for it. He took the lead — depositions, appeals, incessant travel, a suit in France — and pursued it as a moral cause with the same exactness he had brought to the wind tunnel. It cost him the work. Many historians argue it cost the country more: American aircraft design stalled while European builders passed it, and in 1917 American pilots went to war in French and British machines. Wilbur fell ill in May 1912 and died of typhoid fever on the 30th, at 45. Orville and their sister Katharine blamed Curtiss.

He died before the argument over who flew first was finished. The Smithsonian spent years insisting the answer was Samuel Langley, whose 1903 machine had gone into the Potomac twice and which Curtiss quietly rebuilt in 1914 to make the claim stand up. Orville answered by shipping the 1903 Flyer to London in 1928 and leaving it there until the institution recanted. It came home on December 17, 1948, 11 months after Orville died. Ohio and North Carolina still argue about him on their license plates. His high school finally issued the diploma on April 16, 1994, which would have been his 127th birthday.

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

• Wright Cycle Company company
  The bicycle shop in Dayton that paid for the experiments 1892
• Wright wind tunnel invention
  Six feet long, built in the back of the shop — it corrected the field's lift tables 1901
• Wright Flyer invention
  First powered, sustained and controlled airplane flight, December 17, 1903 1903
• U.S. Patent 821393 — Flying Machine patent
  Filed March 23, 1903, granted May 22, 1906, and litigated for six years 1906
• The Wright Company company
  Incorporated in New York with Wilbur as president 1909

• 1885 aged ~18 A hockey stick takes out his front teeth and he withdraws from the world Oliver Crook Haugh, the boy who swung it, was executed for murder in 1907.
• 1889 aged ~22 His mother dies of tuberculosis after years in his care
• 1892 aged ~25 Opens the Wright Cycle Company with Orville
• May 30, 1899 aged 32 Writes the Smithsonian for everything published on flight Thirteen years to the day before he died.
• 1901 aged ~34 Builds a wind tunnel and discovers the accepted lift tables are wrong
• December 17, 1903 aged 36 Four powered flights at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina Wilbur flew the last and longest — 852 feet in 59 seconds.
• August 8, 1908 aged 41 Flies at Le Mans and ends European doubt overnight His banking turns astonished the crowd, Louis Bleriot among them.
• 1910 aged ~43 Takes over the patent suits and effectively stops designing
• May 30, 1912 aged 45 Dies of typhoid fever in Dayton at 45

• Orville Wright 1871–1948
  Co-inventor of the first successful powered airplane, achieving human flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. brother and partner
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. flew as a passenger in a Wright machine
• Charles Lindbergh 1902–1974
  Aviator who made the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927. influenced
• Amelia Earhart 1897–1937
  Aviation pioneer and the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. influenced
• Neil Armstrong 1930–2012
  Astronaut who commanded Apollo 11 and became the first person to set foot on the lunar surface. carried a piece of his aircraft to the Moon