This week we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright climbed into the Wright brothers' flyer and pushed off of Big Kill Devil Hill. His flight covered 120 feet and lasted 12 seconds.
One picture shows Orville in the flyer aloft, memorializing the first flights. There were four that day. But that picture isn't close to telling the whole story.
The whole story began far from Kitty Hawk with a father and a toy. The whole story gives us a sense of men who were more than just daring-do aerialists or gifted tinkerers. The whole story gives us give us a glimpse of how industrial innovation would work forever after and more reasons why Orville and Wilbur Wright deserve to be honored.
In 1878 the boys' father gave them a toy "helicopter." It had actually been built by a French engineer to test his aerodynamic theories. The boys were captivated.
Their father, Milton, was a minister of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ and later a Bishop who led the conservative faction of his church through two ravaging splits. At home, though, he encouraged all kinds of intellectual interests in his children. Wilbur and Orville grew up to be, in many ways like him.
Like their father, they were independent thinkers with incredible faith in their own judgment. Like him, they persevered in the face of difficulties. Like him, they would rather win outright than negotiate. Those habits of mind, combined with a gift for technology would make them incredible innovators.
They worked long and hard. There were thousands of glider flights and experiments. The picture of Orville rising skyward doesn't show the work that went before as the brothers and what help they could hire or recruit muscled ever larger gliders to the top of the dunes.
When they had a problem they solved it or eliminated it. On the historic trip to Kitty Hawk in December 1903, they broke a propeller shaft. Orville had to go back to Dayton for replacement parts and then they had to make repairs. Wilbur tried the first flight on December 14, but the flyer stalled and the front rudder broke on impact. They had to fix that, too. It took two days.
They never made the same mistake twice. Sometimes they didn't even make a mistake once.
The followed the work of aviation innovators like Otto Lilienthal and Samuel Langley and took advice from the legendary engineer, Octave Chanute. They also researched everything they could. They chose Kitty Hawk for their trials after writing to several weather stations to ascertain conditions.
Wilbur and Orville understood more than just the technical problems they faced. They seem to have figured out early how to deal with the business aspects of their work. They didn't just choose Kitty Hawk because it had the right kind of wind. They also chose it because it was a place where they were assured privacy to experiment out of sight of prying eyes.
They were so concerned with secrecy that when hobbyists set out to recreate the Wright's original flyer, they could not find a single, definitive set of plans. The sets they did find often contradicted each other on key items. And while the Wright brothers achieved the first powered and controlled flight, the first public powered and controlled flight wouldn't happen for three more years and it would be done by someone else.
They were realistic about the best way to make money from their invention, too. They filed patents that they would protect vigorously and viciously. Their court battles with Glenn Curtiss went on for years, driving Curtiss into bankruptcy and ending only in 1917 when the Wright patents expired in France and when the US government created a patent pool in the interest of national defense.
As soon as they had assured patent protection and set up a company, they set about selling their machines as instruments of war to every government that would listen. And they turned out to be surprisingly good promoters and salespeople.
In 1908, Wilbur went to France, where the government was very interested in using an airplane as a tool of war. He demonstrated a Wright brothers aircraft at Le Mans. At almost the same time, Orville was demonstrating a similar aircraft for the US Army. It's a measure of how good a salesman Orville was that the Army bought the aircraft even though the first demonstration ended in a crash and the death of Lt. Thomas Selfridge, the first military aviator killed in an aircraft accident.
The Wright brothers were more than inspired tinkerers and more than romantic young men in their flying machines. They were dedicated and disciplined product developers, among the first to understand the importance of keeping a development process secret. Then , they worked diligently to turn their innovation into a profitable business, using all the tools available including the courts.
The Wright brothers merit the title of "First to Fly," and they should be honored for that first flight. But we should also remember all the work that went into that brief moment of triumph and all the work that followed to turn that triumph into profit.
