Twelve Seconds at Kitty Hawk

In the 1890s, in Dayton, Ohio, two brothers named Wilbur and Orville Wright ran a bicycle shop.

They had never been to university. They built and repaired bicycles, sold them and designed their own. But they had been fascinated by flight since their father brought home a toy helicopter, made of bamboo, cork and paper and powered by a rubber band, when they were boys.

In 1896, they read about the death of Otto Lilienthal, a German pioneer who had made more than two thousand glider flights before he crashed. Wilbur began to read everything he could find about flying.

The problem of control

Many people were trying to build flying machines at the time. Most of them concentrated on making a powerful engine. The Wrights realised that the real problem was something else: control. A flying machine had to be balanced and steered in the air, the way a cyclist balances a bicycle.

Watching birds, Wilbur noticed that they tilted their wings to turn and balance. He worked out a way to do something similar by twisting the tips of a biplane's wings, a technique called wing warping.

They needed a place with strong, steady winds and soft sand for landings. The US Weather Bureau suggested a remote strip of sand dunes on the coast of North Carolina, near a fishing village called Kitty Hawk.

Failure, and failure again

In 1900 they took a glider to Kitty Hawk. It flew, but it produced far less lift than their calculations had promised.

In 1901 they came back with a bigger glider. It was worse. It was hard to control and lifted only about a third as much as expected. They went home to Dayton discouraged. Wilbur is reported to have said, gloomily, that people would not fly in their lifetimes.

But then they began to suspect something important. Their calculations were based on tables of figures published by respected scientists. What if the tables were wrong?

The wind tunnel

That winter, in the back of their bicycle shop, the brothers built a wind tunnel: a wooden box about six feet long, with a fan at one end driven by the shop's engine.

Inside it they placed tiny model wings, made from metal, on delicate balances built from old bicycle spokes and hacksaw blades. They tested around two hundred different wing shapes, measuring carefully how much lift and drag each one produced.

What they found was that the accepted figures were indeed wrong. Now they had their own, accurate data, the first of its kind.

Success in the air

In 1902 they returned to Kitty Hawk with a new glider, designed using their own numbers. It worked beautifully. They added a movable rudder at the back, linked to the wing warping, and made hundreds of successful glides. They had solved the problem of control.

Now they needed power. No car company could supply an engine light enough, so their shop mechanic, Charlie Taylor, built one for them. Nobody had good information about propellers, either, so the brothers worked out the theory themselves, treating a propeller as a wing that spins.

17 December 1903

On 14 December 1903, Wilbur won a coin toss and tried first. The Flyer rose briefly, stalled and came down, slightly damaged.

Three days later, on a cold, windy morning, it was Orville's turn. Five local men, mostly from the nearby lifesaving station, had come to watch. One of them, John T. Daniels, had been asked to take a photograph with the brothers' camera.

At about 10:35, the Flyer ran along its wooden rail and lifted into the air.

It flew for twelve seconds and covered about 120 feet, less than the length of a modern passenger jet. But it was the first time a powered, heavier-than-air machine with a pilot had taken off under its own power, flown under control and landed on ground as high as where it started.

Daniels's photograph, taken at the moment it left the ground, became one of the most famous pictures in history.

They flew three more times that day. On the last flight, Wilbur stayed in the air for 59 seconds and covered 852 feet.

That afternoon, they sent a telegram to their father in Dayton, telling him they had succeeded and would be home for Christmas.

After Kitty Hawk

At first, few people believed them. It took several more years of work, and public demonstrations in France and the United States in 1908, before the world understood what the bicycle makers from Dayton had done.

Less than sixty-six years after those twelve seconds at Kitty Hawk, human beings walked on the Moon.

Want to read more?

David McCullough's The Wright Brothers is a gripping, readable account. The original 1903 Flyer hangs in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, and the museum's website tells the story in detail.