The Wright Brothers’ First Flight

Wilbur and Orville Wright ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. Tinkering with bicycles had given them a feel for all things mechanical, and when seasonal slumps hurt their sales they turned to a much bigger problem: building a flying machine. They spent years studying the principles of flight and building gliders and other prototypes. Other inventors had flown unpiloted models — Samuel P. Langley had catapulted one from a houseboat on the Potomac in 1896 — but no one had carried a person into the air under power and control.

The Wrights needed a place with strong, steady winds to give lift and soft sand for safe landings. After searching the East Coast, they chose the remote dunes near Kitty Hawk, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. They first came in September 1900 to test gliders, returned in 1901 and 1902, and in 1903 brought a machine powered by a lightweight engine.

After months of setbacks, the brothers were ready on December 17, 1903. Men from the Kill Devil Hills Lifesaving Station, about a mile away, had been helping them, ferrying visitors and moving equipment; four of the crewmen came to watch. That morning the Wright Flyer rose under its own power and flew for twelve seconds. One of the lifesavers, John T. Daniels, who had volunteered to work the camera, captured the first images of the Wrights’ success. Three more flights followed that day; the fourth and longest lasted 59 seconds.

The Wrights went home to Dayton and kept testing, building more powerful models in the following years. Their achievement — study and scientific experiment, not luck, as the National Park Service stresses — solved the basic problems of powered, controlled flight. Wilbur died of typhoid fever in 1912; Orville died of a heart attack in 1948.

In 1927 Congress set aside the site near Kill Devil Hill, and a tall white granite monument now stands on the hill “in commemoration of the conquest of the air”; the site is today the Wright Brothers National Memorial. The National Park Service calls their story the embodiment of “the American ideal of hard work overcoming all obstacles.” Sixty-six years after the twelve-second flight, Americans landed on the moon.