Wilbur and Orville – The wright brothers and their first flight which has created a huge buzz around the world yet, at first glance, unlikely heroes: pricks in the press, selling their planes to foreign governments, and quickly absorbing ill will. They were involved in one of the longest and ugliest patent battles in history over Curtiss‘ invention of the glider.
For the Wrights, it was all about control– controlling the uncontrollable. Wind, gravity, drag, and thrust—the same four invisible challenges pilots still face today—were more mysterious in 1903. Even today we can see evidence of them, but we never actually see them.
They were lucky. Wright brothers accidentally invented the world’s first safest aircraft flight design (the duck), got more power from their home cooking engine than they planned, and were terrified of downtime (nobody understood them in their day). They tilted their plane’s wings down when it was much safer to tilt them up because they feared that creating a self-winding aircraft would make it difficult to control the plane during these mysterious breaks.
The backdrop of Wrights:
The Wrights were not the most educated of their time. Orville dropped out of high school in his freshman year. Wilbur just missed his senior year due to a sudden family move. But the learning didn’t stop when their formal education ended. They had a passion for learning.
They were the first to successfully use a catapult, perform banked turns, use a wind tunnel, coordinate rudder and wingtip control, and much more. Children born after 1903 grew up in a world where the powered human flight was a practical reality. We grew up thinking about how to make it better; not if it could be achieved.
Heroes are hard to come by, especially these days. I admire their commitment and focus. I admire the courage and audacity to climb aboard an airplane for home cooking in 25 mph winds, literally throwing caution to the wind. They had the tenacity and brain power to build a flying machine and they were a little lucky. On this day in 1903, they took humanity one giant leap forward. They were quirky, flawed, and driven to succeed. They were willing to be considered crazy and happy to be anointed as true pioneers. The Wright brothers, although they are never married, gave birth to the world of flying.
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