Wilbur and Orville Wright grew up in Dayton, Ohio. Their mother, Susan, taught them how to use tools, and the boys asked her for mechanical help. In 1889 the brothers started a print shop and published a newspaper called the West Side News. In 1892 they opened the Wright Cycle Company, a bicycle shop where they sold and fixed bicycles. They built their own bicycles as well. Their younger sister, Katharine, was the youngest of the five Wright children.

An airplane has to be controlled in three ways. Roll tilts the wings from side to side. Pitch moves the nose up and down. Yaw steers the airplane left or right. The Wrights got an idea for roll from watching how birds steady themselves in flight. They called it wing warping. It meant twisting the tips of the wings in opposite directions, with lines the pilot pulled. In the summer of 1899 they built a biplane kite to test their way of steering.

The brothers chose Kitty Hawk because it had strong winds and soft sand to land on. In 1901 the Wrights built their own wind tunnel to test wing shapes. In 1902 they made the rudder movable and connected it to the wing-warping wires, so it turned the right way automatically. That year their best glide went more than 600 feet and lasted 26 seconds. They also saw that a propeller is a wing that turns on a spiral course, so they thought of their propellers as rotary wings.

On December 17, 1903, the brothers made four flights at Kitty Hawk, taking turns as pilot. They had built their own engine, because they could not buy one light enough. Orville flew the first flight, and it lasted 12 seconds. The Flyer weighed about 600 pounds, and its two propellers turned in opposite directions. The longest flight went 852 feet and lasted 59 seconds, with Wilbur at the controls. After the last flight, a gust of wind tipped over the Flyer, and it never flew again.

Their third airplane, built in 1905, is called the first practical airplane. On October 5, 1905, Wilbur flew it in circles for 39 minutes, about 24 miles. To protect their invention before it was patented or sold, the Wrights did not fly in public for more than two years after 1905. In 1908 Wilbur flew in public near Le Mans, France, and amazed the crowds. The brothers later formed the Wright Company to build and sell airplanes and train pilots. In 1948 the Wright Flyer went from the London Science Museum to the Smithsonian Institution. As of November 2026, it is on display in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Words to know

• roll: tilt sideways
• pitch: nose up-down
• yaw: turn left-right
• rudder: steering flap
• patented: legally protected