journal
of science education
The Wright Brothers and their First Flight
Wilbur and Orville Wright were the sons of Milton Wright, a church bishop, from Dayton, Ohio, USA. Wilbur, the elder brother, was born near Milville, Indiana on April 16, 1867 and Orville was born on August 19, 1871 in Dayton. They had two older brothers and a younger sister. Their mother Susan Wright was gifted with a flair for mechanical things; she built simple household appliances and toys for children. Wilbur and Orville seem to have inherited this gift from their mother. Their early interest in aeronautics seems to have been aroused when their father presented them with a rubberband powered helicopter.
Neither Wilbur nor Orville had a high school diploma. They operated a
printing press and a bicycle shop in succession in Dayton. They were bicycle
enthusiasts who eventually started building their own bicycles. And soon
they were looking for new challenges. The parallels between the challenges
of bicycling and flying had been highlighted by several people. One of
them, J H Means, wrote in his journal The Aeronautical Annual in 1896,
“It is not uncommon for the cyclist, in the first flash of enthusiasm
which quickly follows the unpleasantness of taming the steel steed, to
remark: ‘Wheeling is just like flying!’”.
Read full article (22 Kb)The Wright Family
The story of the first powered flight is incomplete without a few words about the remarkable Wright family, for in many ways the Wright Flyer was a family project. First of all the two brothers were both so deeply involved in it that much of the world thinks of them only jointly. Furthermore the project had the blessings of the father, a remarkable bishop and teacher himself; the sum of $ 1000 he gave to Wilbur and Orville was used as a corpus fund by the brothers, who drew on its interest and on their own other resources for their expenditure on the project. Then there was their very intelligent sister Katherine, the only graduate in the family, who not only tended house after the mother passed away (when only 36) but gave intense and warm support to the brothers and kept worrying herself about their progress.
Wilbur and Orville owned their toys jointly. Among the gifts the boys
got from their father was a helicopter driven by a rubber band, of a kind
still seen but made first by the French engineer Alphonse Penaud (the
principle going back to another famous engineer and artist, Leonardo da
Vinci). This toy set the boys thinking about flight.
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