Wright, Orville

Wright, Orville (1871-1948), American inventor.

Orville Wright and his elder brother, Wilbur, invented the airplane.

The two brothers ran a shop in Dayton, Ohio, selling and repairing bicycles.

They began to study the problems of flight in 1899 and built three biplane gliders. Each of these they tested on the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and with the third they made more than 1,000 successful flights.

Then they built a lightweight petrol engine and put this into their fourth aircraft. They called it the Flyer. At half-past ten on the cold, grey morning of 17 December, 1903, four men and a boy stood watching at Kitty Hawk. They saw the Flyer, with Orville as pilot, rise into the air and remain there for 12 seconds. It came down after covering 121 feet (37m). That is more than 23 feet (7m) less than the wing-span of a Boeing 747.

This was the first airplane flight in history. That same day, Wilbur was in the air for 59 seconds covering 823 feet (251m).

Within two years, the Wright brothers had produced two more airplanes. The third could bank, turn, circle, make figures of eight and fly for half an hour without landing. It was able to fly more than twenty miles (thirty-two kilometers).

The original Flyer can be seen today in the United States National Air Museum in Washington, DC. There is an exact copy of it in the Science Museum, London.

See Larry E. Tise Conquering the Sky: The Secret Flights of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk