For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man."
Wilbur Wright in 1900
On the morning of December 17,1903, amid the sand dunes of Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, Orville Wright (1871-1948) took off into a gale-force wind aboard the gasoline-powered biplane, Wright Flyer. Orville flew for only twelve seconds, but later, in the fourth flight attempt of the day, his brother Wilbur (1867-1912) stayed aloft for. fifty-nine seconds, traveling a distance of 852 feet (260 m). It was enough to constitute the holy grail of flight experimenters—sustained, controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight.
Bicycle manufacturers from Dayton, Ohio, the Wright brothers had approached the problem of flight with a combination of practical hands-on experimentation and scientific rigor. After absorbing all published information on previous flight experiments, in 1900 they built the first of a series of gliders that they tested each summer in North Carolina. Each winter, back in Dayton, they refined their design, building their own crude wind tunnel to test different wing shapes and angles. They created an ingenious control system with a front elevator for pitch, a rudder for horizontal yaw, and wing- warping—the bending of the wing-tips—to control roll. Through their glider experiments they taught themselves to fly, lying prone to reduce drag. When they felt ready for powered flight, they designed and built their own engine and their own propellers.
The Wright Flyer was underpowered. For further flight experiments in Dayton in 1904 and 1905, without the aid of a strong headwind, the Wrights built a catapult to help the aircraft off the ground. With this assistance, they made flights of up to thirty-eight minutes at a time when no other flight experimenter even claimed to have achieved more than a brief hop in a straight line.
