The Equivocal Success of the

The Wrights used aerial control as the key to building

and flying the first airplane. But trying to refine their
invention in secret nearly cost them their glory

By Daniel C. Schlenoff

n December 17, 1903, Orville Wright took off

in a powered airplane, flew for 12 seconds and 120 feet, then
bumped down into the sand. A century later we honor the date
as an aviation milestone, but for that flight alone it is hard to ar-
gue that the Wrights were more successful than other inventors
who had already flown farther (and crashed harder).
It took two more years for the Wrights to build and fly the
world’s first truly controllable airplane. Unfortunately, until they
felt sure of the sale of their perfected machine, their secretiveness
invited skepticism from Scientific American and other publications
of the day and left them underappreciated by their peers and the
general public.
Other contenders for the “first airplane” laurels merely made
short or uncontrolled flights. Clement Ader can be credited with
the first powered takeoff in 1890. But his steam-powered aircraft
reached an altitude of eight inches, sufficient to classify it as a flight
only to his French countrymen. German-born Gustave Whitehead
was adept at fabricating stories about flying in the U.S., but he nev-
er built a workable airplane. New Zealanders are proud of
Richard Pearse: in March 1903 this reclusive, eccentric farmer flew
his bamboo-and-canvas monoplane for about 450 feet before
crashing into a gorse hedge. His example illustrates, rather painful-
ly, the need for controllability in aerial navigation.
WILBUR AND ORVILLE WRIGHT (left and right), printers,
bicycle mechanics, inventors of the powered airplane. Control Is the Key
WILBUR WRIGHT, in a talk before the Western Society of Engi-
neers in Chicago in September 1901, said that the greatest obsta-
cle to a functional airplane was “the balancing and steering of the
AP PHOTO

machine after it is actually in flight.” The Wrights therefore gave

priority to working out a method of aerial control. They also re-

94 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN DECEMBER 2003

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 THE WRIGHT AIRPLANE
is publicly demonstrated
by Wilbur for the first
time. His flights in the
Model A on August 8,
1908, at a racetrack
near Le Mans, France,
showed that the Wrights
were far ahead of
any competitor.

alized that just as a cyclist needed to learn how to ride a bicy- ries. The kite was rigged with wires that slightly twisted the
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, VOL. XCIV, NO. 9, AUGUST 29, 1908

cle, a pilot would have to learn how to fly. wings while aloft. An elevator, a small wing set forward of the
The Wrights studied the work of Otto Lilienthal, a German main wing, stabilized the pitch (up-and-down motion) of the
engineer widely considered to be the world’s first pilot. Lilien- craft. Promising results encouraged them to make a scaled-up
thal made thousands of flights in sophisticated gliders of his own version in 1900 with a wing area of 165 square feet.
design, steering by shifting his body just as hang gliders do to- They took this kite to Kitty Hawk, on the Outer Banks of
day. He perished after a flying accident, however, and the North Carolina, where consistently steady breezes blew off the
Wrights decided they needed a method of control more suitable Atlantic Ocean and the gently sloping sand dunes provided
for airplanes big enough to carry a motor. They thought that if space and a soft landing. The Wrights were pleased enough
the wingtips could be warped while in flight, then the balance with the results of their experiments to return in 1901 with an
and the direction of the flying machine could be maintained. ambitiously larger glider, but they went back to Dayton puz-
In August 1899 the Wrights, taking a break from their prof- zled by problems they had encountered with the contemporary
itable bicycle business in Dayton, Ohio, constructed a small bi- aeronautical data. To refine their wing designs, they tested
plane kite with a five-foot wingspan to test some of their theo- more than 60 model cross sections in a wind tunnel they built.

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 From the information they gleaned came the 1902 glider, noted: “This is a decided step in advance in aerial navigation
with an efficient, long, narrow wing design. They added a twin with aeroplanes” [see 50, 100 & 150 Years Ago, on page 22].
vertical tail to control yaw (side-to-side movement). The pilot The Wrights were triumphant aircraft inventors. Unfortu-
lay prone in a hip cradle, and his own lateral movement pulled nately, they were terrible aviation businessmen. They became
wires that warped the wings and controlled flight direction. At so concerned about losing financial control of their invention
Kitty Hawk during the late summer and early fall, both broth- that they kept it away not only from the prying eyes of com-
ers logged many hours of unpowered flight in this glider. petitors but also from potential customers and those who could
Having constructed and learned how to fly an unpowered air- have helped spread word of their progress. Even after they were
craft, the Wrights then embarked on creating a more robust, mo- awarded patent number 821,393 in May 1906 (after a wait of
torized version. Most automobile engines being too heavy, they three years), they did not believe that it offered much protec-
designed their own and built it using an aluminum-copper alloy. tion— an opinion that turned out to be justified.
To find the optimal shape for propellers, they turned again Back in Dayton, at Huffman Prairie, the Wrights continued
to wind-tunnel testing, treating the propeller as a small revolv- work on producing a salable flying machine. With their Flyer 2
ing wing. Their design had an efficiency of almost 70 percent, they made more than 100 short flights, later on using a catapult
just 10 percent less than modern versions. They mounted two to facilitate takeoff. Still, they avoided the limelight, much to
of these propellers at the back of the aircraft [see illustration on the frustration of aviation enthusiasts excited by snippets of
opposite page], rotating in opposite directions to counter effects news. In June 1904, with rumors trickling in from Dayton, Sci-
from torque. entific American complained: “Great secrecy was maintained
about the test, and but few witnessed it.”
The Great Day There was at least one witness, Amos Ives Root, and he
A T K I L L D E V I L H I L L S near Kitty Hawk on December 17, wrote an article about what he had seen. He published it in his
1903, the Wrights sat their Flyer 1 on the launching rail, laid magazine, Gleanings in Bee Culture, on January 1, 1905. Root
on flat sand. Orville was at the controls (decided by a coin toss). claimed that Scientific American had rejected his offer to pub-
They started the motor and, with Wilbur running alongside lish the article. We have no record of why the editors might
guiding the wing, the craft became airborne— briefly. If it is de- have done so, but perhaps the style was too flowery for their
batable whether the first flight of the day was a controlled flight taste. Here is the first sentence as it appeared in Bee Culture:
or a hop, the fourth and last, with Wilbur at the controls, was “I have a wonderful story to tell you— a story that, in some re-
definitive: it covered 852 feet in 59 seconds. The Wrights had spects, out rivals the Arabian Nights fables— a story, too, with
flown a powered, heavier-than-air machine in free, controlled, a moral that I think many of the younger ones need, and per-
sustained flight. Nine days later Scientific American cautiously haps some of the older ones too if they will heed it.”

COURTESY OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, WRIGHT STATE UNIVERSITY

THEORIZE, TEST, REFINE:
The Wrights applied the
lessons they learned
from more simple flying
machines. This
photograph, more than a
century old, shows them
conducting experiments
on their glider/kite near
Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1901.

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 A Wright Brothers Myth
A POPULAR MYTH about the Wright brothers is that “they were Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier. By 1903 pow-
considered cranks because everyone knew that flying was im- ered balloon flights and glider soaring were commonplace, and
possible.” Untrue. This fiction is based on the turn-of-the-cen- engines were becoming lighter and producing more horsepow-
tury writings of several skeptics, principally Simon Newcomb, a er. Fitting the elements together was acknowledged as tricky,
prominent astronomer, who noted the difficulty of scaling up the risky and expensive, but few people thought that airplane flying
power needed for working models to full-size aircraft. The real- would always be “impossible.” It was the Wrights’ secretiveness
ity is that people had been flying since 1783, thanks to the in- that made this magazine (and many others) skeptical about
vention in France of a practical hot-air balloon by brothers their accomplishment. — D.S.

The Flyer 2 and the Flyer 3 were as difficult to control as the today still revere Santos-Dumont as the Father of Aviation.
Kitty Hawk Flyer, and hard landings were frequent (points In an effort to encourage innovation in aeronautics, the
worth remembering by those attempting modern re-creations Aero Club of America and this magazine offered a prize in 1907
of the aircraft). A crash in July 1905 forced the Wrights into a to the first person who could take off and fly one kilometer in
radical and fortuitous reconstruction of the Flyer 3. They en- a straight line. The Wrights chose to pursue sales contracts and
larged the control surfaces and placed them farther from the did not compete for the prize. Glenn Hammond Curtiss and the
center of balance. On October 5, 1905, with Wilbur at the con- Aerial Experiment Association, backed by Alexander Graham
trols, the airplane flew 24 miles in 39.5 minutes. Bell, entered and won the trophy with their June Bug aircraft in
The Wrights had developed the world’s first truly practical a triumphal flight on July 4, 1908. Because of this feat and the
airplane and clinched their status as avia- prominence of Curtiss in early American
tion pioneers. But it was a laurel conferred aviation as a pilot and inventor, many in
by history alone, because the Wrights al- the U.S. believed he was the first to fly.
lowed so few people to observe— or pho- The Wrights waited until they were
tograph— the aircraft flying. It was not un- close to selling airplanes to both the U.S.
til 1990 that the Flyer 3 was designated as Army Signal Corps and to a French syndi-
a National Historic Landmark, the sole cate before showing their aircraft publicly.
airplane ever to receive that honor. Starting on August 8, 1908, at a racetrack
The Wrights offered to sell the airplane near Le Mans, France, in a Wright Model
to, variously, the U.S. secretary of war, the A Flyer, Wilbur astonished viewers with
French, the British and the Germans. But multiple flights of unprecedented piloting
they refused to demonstrate its flight ca- skill and technological advance, and the
pabilities without a signed sales contract. Wrights were hailed as heroes.
Not surprisingly, customers balked at buy- By 1909 the Wrights reached the peak
ing so novel a device without seeing of their fame. In the autumn of that year
whether it worked. perhaps a million astounded onlookers
Unable to get additional information saw Wilbur fly over New York Harbor and
from, or about, the Wrights, Scientific around the Statue of Liberty; a few days
PAINTING of a section of the 1903 Flyer,
American commented huffily in a January with one of its 8.5-foot-long propellers, later a similarly huge crowd saw him take
1906 article, “It seems that these alleged graces the cover of our July 1979 issue. an aerial trip up the Hudson River.
experiments were made at Dayton, Ohio, Yet the burgeoning field of aviation was
a fairly large town, and that the newspapers of the United rapidly overtaking the Wrights as money and talent poured into
States, alert as they are, allowed these sensational performances this exciting new industry. By 1911 several companies, mostly
to escape their notice.” in Europe, were manufacturing aircraft that were safer, faster
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, VOL. 241, NO. 1, JULY 1979

The French dubbed the Wrights “bluffeurs.” A German and more maneuverable than the Wright flyers.
aeronautical journal called their flights “ein amerikanischer When Wilbur died of typhoid fever in 1912, Orville was left
‘bluff.’ ” The Wrights, however, did not think their flying ma- floundering against the rising tide of competition and fighting
chine sufficiently advanced to demonstrate it yet. protracted patent-infringement lawsuits. By 1915 he had tired
of the flying business, and he quit. But he never gave up strug-
Fame Slips Away gling to secure his status in the history books as half of the team
M E A N W H I L E , F A R A W A Y from Dayton, in France, Brazilian- that had worked so hard and so successfully to solve the prob-
born Alberto Santos-Dumont made the first public demonstra- lem of airplane flight.
tion of flight. He took off from a field on November 12, 1906,
and flew for 722 feet. Because there was no proof to the contrary Daniel C. Schlenoff edits the 50, 100 & 150 Years Ago
at the time, he was hailed as the first man to fly. His countrymen column in Scientific American.

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