Wilbur was born in 1867, and Orville four years later the third and sixth of seven children born to Milton and Susan Koerner Wright. Milton was a minister in the United Brethren Church, an evangelical Protestant denomination, and the family moved frequently until Milton was named a bishop in the church and the family settled in Dayton, Ohio. In childhood and throughout their lives, Orville and Wilbur were constant companions (in ‘Wilbur's words, the brothers “lived together, played together; worked together, and, in fact, thought together”) and displayed many of the Yankee characteristics of their parents and forebears: an inner-directed Spartan strength and a clear-eyed, determined outlook on the world and on life. Neither brother finished high school. though they were both insatiable readers and tinkerers. The Wright brothers tried their hand at several enterprises, including publishing newspapers and running a printing shop, hut without success.

Wilbur's drawings of the 1899 Kite, the Wright brothers' first aeronautical experiment

 With a pilot (in this case, Oiville) warping the wing, the glider banked as expected, but would “slip” to the side and invariably crash sideways into the sand.

There are many stories about how the Wrights came upon wing warping, but the fact is that the technique was not new, and at least one American experimenter, E. F. Gallaudet, made use of it in kite tests near New Haven, Connecticut, in 1898. With their customary thoroughness, the Wrights also wrote to the U.S. Weather Bureau to find out the best place to test aircraft. On the basis of that information, they selected the Kill Devil Hills sand dunes outside Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a fishing village on the Outer Banks, a thin peninsula that jutted out into the Atlantic and enjoyed strong and relatively constant winds.

The solution was to place a double rudder in the rear so the glider would “bite” the wind when it banked into a turn, as it does here as Wilbur banks the glider in the 1902 tests. The pilot is still lying down in order to cut down wind resistance (“drag”).

The locals liked the Wrights and the Wrights liked them, but the brothers’ natural reticence caused some people to regard them as secretive—some believed that was why Kitty Hawk was chosen as a test site in the first place. But at this stage, the Wrights were not at all hesitant to share their findings with fellow researchers. In fact, in the midst of their experiments, Wilbur accepted an invitation from Chanute to report on his and his brother’s experiments at a meeting of the Western Society of Engineers in Chicago, and many of the people Chanute kept bringing to Kitty Hawk to assist them were, the Wrights well knew, doing research of their own. The craft “flew” (it actually glided) well enough, but with thirty percent less lift than the Wrights had calculated.

The Wright brothers had clearly uncorked a torrent of industry and creativity that had simply been waiting for some indication that the prospect of flight was not hopeless. But if the Wrights were the spark that ignited the enterprise, there were other forces at work that drove it to a fever pitch. One was the giddy optimism that characterized the opening of the new century. True, the twentieth century’s ambivalence about technology was born in its very first decade, but in the face of the many advances from 1900 to 1914, it really began to look as if technology could and would make just about anything possible.

Behind all the hoopla of the races, the feats, the records, the stunts, the glamour and derring-do—all the romance of early aviation—were calculating minds fully aware (or aware enough to take anxious notice) of the military potential of flight. In the decade between Kitty Hawk and the outbreak of World War I, one can summarize the history of aviation very simply: while the Wrights and Curtiss were slugging each other senseless in court, the Europeans slowly took the lead in aviation. The Wrights won many of their court battles, but lost the war for supremacy in the air.

They enjoyed two crowning moments in the decade following Kitty Hawk: their exhibition in France and their test for the Army at Ft. Myer. But they allowed many opportunities to slip by: while Curtiss was winning prizes for aviation feats he was performing years after the Wrights had passed that level of technology, the brothers were too proud or secretive to claim any prize; while Curtiss was winning races that the Wrights could have won handily, the brothers would not consent to enter any contests; while Curtiss was gaining fame participating in aerial exhibitions and air shows, the Wrights regarded them as circuses unworthy of their talents; while Curtiss was forming productive and useful alliances with a wide range of people—from Bell and the Smithsonian to August Herring, Octave Chanute’s old assistant to Henry Ford and his high-priced patent lawyers—the Wrights steadfastly rebuffed any offer of collegiality (including from Curtiss) and preferred to go it alone; while Curtiss developed new technology as quickly as it became available—he abandoned wing warping when it became clear ailerons were a superior means of lateral control; he developed wheeled undercarriages when they were shown to be preferable to skids; and he experimented with different engines and configurations

Wright wind tunnel

The Wrights never strayed far from the basic design configuration they inherited from Chanute; and while Curtiss developed the entire field of naval aviation, developing seaplanes that could consider attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean, the Wrights entered the field belatedly and half-heartedly.

Contrary to legend, the reaction of the press to the historic flight was not a deafening silence. The Dayton Evening Herald reported the flight the next day on the front page, and the Virginian-Pilot was careful to point out in a sub-headline that no balloon had been attached to the aircraft. Garbled accounts appeared on the front page of the New York Herald, but there was little follow-up and many of the sporadic reports that appeared during the first two years after Kitty Hawk ridiculed the Wrights’ claim by adding facetious exaggerations to the account. The first full, serious, and accurate account of the Wrights in flight appeared in the January 1, 1905, issue of Gleanings in Bee Culture, an apiary journal, written by the publisher, Amos I. Root. But the Wrights were not people to waste time. On their return to Dayton, they immediately set to work on the Flyer 2. incorporating all that they had learned in the Carolina dunes. It looked like the first machine, but had a smaller wing surface and a gentler camber. Most importantly, it had a more powerful engine.

The brothers rented a ninety-acre (36ha) farm outside of Dayton that became known as “Huffman Prairie” (after the owner) and tested their new machine there. On September 20, 1904, Wilbur flew the Flyer 2 in a complete circle and returned to his starting point and landed. This was the flight Root witnessed and described, and in the minds of some aviation historians, this flight and the others conducted at Huffman (and not the four Kitty Hawk flights) deserve to be considered the beginning of the age of flight. (Others point out, however, that these take-offs were not unassisted: to compensate for the lighter winds, the Wrights launched their aircraft at Huffman with a weight-and-derrick launcher.) The best flight of the season, four circles of the field, lasted over five minutes.

In the summer of 1905, the Wrights tested an even more improved machine, Flyer 3, as always, in full view of onlookers and inviting the press to important tests, which they rarely attended. The aircraft had an even smaller wing surface but the same camber as the 1903 machine. This time the machine flew beautifully, and many of the more than forty flights conducted were limited only by the amount of fuel the aircraft could carry. The plane could take off and land with minimal adjustment, and the elevator and rear rudder, pushed out farther from the wings, gave the pilot almost complete control of the aircraft in flight. The longest flight of that summer was over a half hour, and the aircraft could circle and fly figure eights easily. This aircraft, the Flyer 3, is often referred to as the first practical aircraft in history.