The 1903 Wright Flyer
Wilbur and Orville Wright (Wilbur Wright 1867 to 1912; Orville Wright 1871 to 1948) · 1903
In a darkened gallery of its own, at eye level and close enough to see the weave of the fabric, sits the machine that made the first powered, controlled flight in history. Two pale wings of muslin stretched over spruce ribs, a pair of propellers driven by bicycle chains, a small engine lying on its side beside the pilot's cradle, and at the front a pair of elevators like a box kite. On the seventeenth of December 1903, on the sand at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright lay on the lower wing and flew it thirty seven metres in twelve seconds. By the end of the day Wilbur had flown it for fifty nine seconds and two hundred and sixty metres.
The brothers were bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio, and the Flyer is a bicycle maker's aircraft. Look at the chains that drive the propellers, one of them crossed so that the two turn in opposite directions, and the hip cradle that the pilot shifted to warp the wingtips and bank the machine. That wing warping, combined with a movable rudder, was the invention that mattered: not the engine, which they built themselves when no manufacturer would, but control in three axes. The propellers, which they designed from their own wind tunnel data, were the most efficient in the world at the time. A gust wrecked the Flyer after the fourth flight and it never flew again.
Orville fell out with the Smithsonian, which for years credited its own former secretary Samuel Langley with the first flying machine, and in 1928 he sent the Flyer to the Science Museum in London in protest. It came home only in 1948, after the Smithsonian formally recanted, and arrived a few months after his death. The gallery around it holds the brothers' tools, a bicycle they built, and the photograph of the first flight taken by a coastguard who had never used a camera before. The fabric on the wings is original in places, patched in others, and the whole machine weighs less than four adults.
Did You Know? The Wrights' contract with the Smithsonian says the museum must never claim any earlier machine was capable of powered flight, or the family can take the Flyer back.
Unlock the Full Guide
Read every room and listen to every work in all museums with premium.