The Wright Brothers

The aim in this book has been to satisfy the curiosity of the average, non-technical reader regarding the work of the Wright Brothers, and to do so as simply as possible. No att...

A principal “parade wagon” was the running gear of an old buggy, with no body but only a few planks to make a platform on which were some of the “thousands of rare birds,” and a...

Now Orville saw greater opportunities opening before them. With a liquid capital of $2, they could buy more type, do a greater variety of printing, and thus have more fun. But E...

That neither Lilienthal nor any other experimenter had ever tried any more adequate method to insure lateral balance struck Orville as surprising. Why, he asked himself, wouldn’...

Almost as soon as they began their trials of the glider, the brothers got another surprise. According to the Lilienthal tables of air pressures, their machine of 165 square feet...

Chanute might well have felt pride in the effectiveness of his insistence that the Wrights should go on experimenting, as well as in the results of his invitation to Wilbur to m...

The shafts, made of larger and heavier tubing, arrived from Dayton on November 20. When they were tested again, a new difficulty appeared. The sprockets, which were screwed to t...

Katharine Wright immediately sent a message to Octave Chanute that the “boys” had reported four successful flights. Bishop Wright asked his son Lorin to prepare a brief statemen...

Even if they had tried, the Wrights could hardly have kept secret what they were doing here at the Huffman prairie, with an interurban car line and two highways passing the fiel...

Looking back over their experiments, the Wrights noted that “in 1903, 62 pounds per horsepower were carried at a speed of 30 miles an hour; in 1904, 53 pounds at 34 miles an hou...

We are prepared to furnish a machine on contract, to be accepted only after trial trips in which the conditions of the contract have been fulfilled; the machine to carry an oper...

Ernest Archdeacon, of the Aéro Club, placed an order with M. Dargent, a model maker of Chalais-Meudon, to build a copy of the Wright 1902 glider. Early in 1904 (January 28), Cap...

To the Wrights’ surprise he told them, in reply to a question, that he had no connection with the French War Ministry. He had come, he said, on behalf of a syndicate of wealthy...

General Picquart was not familiar with what had previously been done regarding the possible purchase of a Wright machine, as the negotiations had been carried on during the regi...

During all their experiments at the Huffman pasture they had continued to ride “belly-buster,” as a boy usually does when coasting on a sled. Lying flat in that way and controll...

The next and final flight, September 17, ended in tragedy. Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, a twenty-six-year-old West Point graduate, from San Francisco, had been assigned at his o...

Within a few hours cables brought word that Orville would recover, and Wilbur was able to fly again the next day. Two days later, on September 21, he flew about forty miles, in...

Almost immediately after the Fort Myer trials and formal acceptance of the machine, on August 2, by the United States Government, Orville Wright, accompanied by his sister Katha...

Roy Knabenshue knew from his experience in making public airship exhibitions, that it was not enough to go where a fair or carnival was to be held and suggest airplane flights a...

I learn from the _Scientific American_ that your “June Bug” has movable surfaces at the tips of the wings, adjustable to different angles on the right and left sides for maintai...

Walcott on December 23, 1916, wrote what Orville considered a perfunctory letter saying: “... the importance of securing for the National Museum the Wright aeroplane which was e...

It will be noted that Orville Wright did not even ask that the Smithsonian should say it did not believe the original Langley machine could fly. All he asked was that the facts...

[8] When the airplane was first considered for military purposes, the Wrights thought the plane could be such a destructive instrument in warfare that no nation, no government,...

Wright, Wilbur NOTE: For joint activities with Orville, _see above_, Wright brothers. Birth, 22; boyhood enterprises, 7, 8–9, 12–13, 15; schooling, 23–24; illness, 26; joins O....