The school reports of the Wright Brothers did not sound promising, yet in their disparaging remarks their teachers were describing qualities that were probably the key to their success.
Wilbur, born in 1867 in America’s mid-west, was described as ‘dreamy’ and reports of his younger brother of four years, Orville, portrayed an interminable mischief-maker.
Perceived another way, this heady combination of romanticism and a compulsion to push boundaries was the dream ticket that took the Wright Brothers into the sky.
Both enthralled by mechanics from childhood, the Wright boys shunned high school to set up their own weekly newspaper after Orville built a printing press out of a tombstone and buggy parts! They also opened a bicycle shop in 1892, repairing and building bikes as well as selling them.
Inspired by the antics of the German gliding legend Otto Lilienthal in 1894, the lads began to study aeronautics, gleaning scientific information from wherever they could. They built their own wind tunnel and worked out that the ideal wing shape for a plane was long and thin.
By 1901 they were testing their own gliders off sand dunes near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina and they spent the next couple of years building a lightweight engine and propellers to counteract the plane’s tendency to roll laterally.
On 17 December 1903 they made history with a skeletal machine made out of spruce, ash and muslin, and which weighed only 600lbs unmanned. They made 4 flights that day, Orville managing 120 feet – the first sustained powered flight – although this was surpassed by Wilbur, who flew 852 feet in 59 seconds.
Their achievement, which both shrunk the world and rolled back the frontiers of what mankind was capable of, was only reported in four newspapers at the time and was reported as exaggerated in some quarters.
Having wowed the aviation community, the brothers were commissioned to build the first military airplane and set up their own plane manufacturing company and flying school.
Wilbur died in 1912 and never had the chance – unlike his brother who remained an aeronautical engineer until his death in 1948 – to see the enormous industry spawned from their fever to fly and the far-reaching implications for international travel and warfare.
