On September 20, 1904, Wilbur Wright flew a lap around an Ohio field, becoming the first person to fly a powered aircraft in a full circle. It had been around 9 months since his brother Orville first achieved powered flight 600 miles away on the blustery dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and the brothers had returned home to advance their work while deciding what to do next. We know well the story of what happened 9 months earlier when they first flew into the history books, but how they spent their remaining years is not widely known. Like so many innovators and notables, they are known for their great achievement, but nothing more. Today we explore the Wright Brothers after their famous flight.
While the first powered flight is hailed internationally as a milestone of human achievement, it did not turn the Wright Brothers into overnight celebrities. In fact, for a number of reasons, it received little news coverage and many remained skeptical of their feat. They returned to Dayton not as conquering heroes, but as anonymously as they had left. Regardless of public perception, they knew what they had accomplished, and made plans almost immediately to be the first men to go into the airplane business.
A news item appeared in the December 26, 1903 issue of the New York Times announcing that the inventors of a “Box Kite Machine” were seeking buyers for their contraption. This was the first mention of the Wright Brothers and their successful flight in the paper of record, and while it made the first page it was between an article about a woman who had accidentally suffocated on gas fumes while preparing Christmas dinner, and another about a man in Waukegan, Illinois who prophesied Christ’s return sometime in the next hundred years. It may have been front page news in the literal sense, but nobody saw it as groundbreaking. There are plenty of mentions of airships and notable crashes in the pages of newspapers from this time, and when not placed in the context of their subsequent successes, their flight at Kitty Hawk wouldn’t stand out from the noise.
The low profile of the Wright brothers at this time was at least partly intentional. The brothers had not yet received a patent for their revolutionary aeronautical designs, and were terrified that were they to demonstrate their craft for a larger audience, their concepts would surely be stolen. Back in Dayton they invited the press, with no cameras allowed, to observe a test flight in a nearby field. Following engine trouble, the plane only managed 30 feet of travel before falling to the ground. Unimpressed, the reporters lost interest and wouldn’t cover the Wright brothers’ test flights for the next couple of years. Some argue the brothers did this on purpose as a tricky method of avoiding prolonged attention, but we can never be sure.
By 1905, the brothers had advanced their technology significantly and decided to focus on selling it. Wilbur proved on October 5th that the third version of their flyer could travel over 24 miles before safely landing. With these results in hand, the brothers split up, Orville traveling to persuade the government to purchase planes, and Wilbur steaming over to France to generate buzz there. The French were much more interested in aviation than the Americans, and Wilbur received a grand welcome. Thousands came to watch him demonstrate the accuracy and controllability of the flyer, with royals from England and Spain even making the trip to observe. The flyer, and the brothers, were widely lauded on the continent for their milestone accomplishment.
Back in America, things did not go as well for Orville. After traveling to Virginia to demonstrate the flyer for the Army, he set yet another record by remaining airborne for over 60 minutes. While this was impressive, what happened next was a major setback. A week after his record setting flight, Orville took an Army lieutenant up as his passenger as part of a demonstration, but during the flight a propellor shattered and the plane crashed. The lieutenant was killed, and Orville suffered multiple injuries that would leave him in the hospital for months and in pain for decades. After his convalescence, Orville joined Wilbur in Europe, where they toured France and Italy before returning to America.
While they had found easy celebrity in Europe, America caught up quickly. Upon their return they were invited to meet with President Taft and, even better, they sold their first flyer to the Army. This hastened the creation of the Wright Company, which continues today to manufacture airplane parts. While it made airplanes for sale to the Army, the Wright Company also made money by sending planes to air shows and perforating stunts, like hand delivering silk to a department store in Columbus for a hefty $5,000 fee (over $100,000 in 2014 dollars). The brothers put together a flight team in 1910, but disbanded it in 1911 after two of the nine pilots had been killed in crashes. It had still been fewer than ten years since they had first flown, so flight was still a very risky proposition.
Once the brothers had proven the possibility of flight, the pace of innovation was staggering. Just six years elapsed between the first flight, which lasted around a minute, and Orville’s successful hour-long endeavor. Europeans began building planes as well, and by 1915 most agreed that European planes had surpassed Americans in terms of technology and ability. During the first World War aircraft was used for reconnaissance, and even bombing, just over ten years since the first flight.
In April of 1944, Orville Wright stepped aboard a Lockheed Constellation for what would be his final flight. He remarked that the wingspan of the plane was in fact longer than his 1903 flight had traveled. What’s more, the Constellation had stopped to pick him up after a trip from Los Angeles to Washington D.C. that had taken it around 7 hours. It’s truly astonishing that aeronautical technology advanced so quickly that the man who first flew his modified wood and paper glider lived to see the first transatlantic flight, the beginnings of mass passenger air travel, and even the first successful supersonic flight when Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in his Bell X-1. It’s important to understand that the Wright brothers didn’t just kick off the age of air travel, but guided and nursed through its infancy, breaking not just the first record, but many thereafter. While the flights at Kitty Hawk opening the starting gate, the events of the following years were far more important in setting the rapid pace of innovation in the 20th century.
