History

The Wright Brothers

Wilbur and Orville Wright gave the world its first successful powered, controlled airplane, and nearly everything that led up to it happened in Dayton, Ohio. Wilbur was born on April 16, 1867, near Millville, Indiana. Orville was born on August 19, 1871, in the family home at 7 Hawthorn Street on Dayton’s west side. They were two of the five surviving children of Milton Wright, a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, and Susan Koerner Wright, a mechanically gifted woman who encouraged her children’s curiosity.

Neither brother received a high school diploma, but both were avid readers and natural engineers. In later years they often recalled a toy helicopter their father brought home in 1878, a rubber-band-powered device based on a design by the French experimenter Alphonse Pénaud, as the spark of their lifelong interest in flight. The brothers never married, and they worked side by side for their entire careers, sharing credit for everything they achieved.

Life in Dayton, Ohio

The Wrights’ first business was printing. In 1889 Orville started the West Side News, a weekly newspaper, with Wilbur soon joining as editor. They also printed the Dayton Tattler for their friend and former classmate Paul Laurence Dunbar, who went on to become a celebrated poet.

In 1892, riding the national bicycle craze, the brothers opened a bicycle sales and repair shop, which became the Wright Cycle Company. By 1896 they were building bicycles of their own design. The shop gave them the skills, tools and income that made their flying experiments possible: precision machining, lightweight structures, and an understanding of how a rider balances and steers an inherently unstable machine.

That same year the death of the German glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal renewed their interest in flight. In 1899 Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution asking for everything it had published on aeronautics. Working in the back of their Dayton shop, the brothers developed “wing warping,” a method of twisting the wings to roll and steer the aircraft, and tested it on a kite that summer. In the fall of 1901 they built a small wind tunnel in the shop and tested some 200 wing shapes, producing the most accurate aeronautical data of the time. Their shop mechanic, Charlie Taylor, built the lightweight engine for their 1903 airplane.

Dayton remained their home and headquarters for the rest of their lives. In 1909 the city honored them with a two-day homecoming celebration, and that November the brothers formed the Wright Company. In 1910 they built America’s first airplane factory on Dayton’s west side, where workers were hired and trained to build the Wright Model B, the first airplane the Wrights produced in quantity. The Wright Company flying school operated at Huffman Prairie, and on November 7, 1910, a Model B made the first commercial cargo flight, carrying silk from Dayton to Columbus (see our Cargo Flight Re-enactment).

Wilbur died of typhoid fever in Dayton on May 30, 1912, at age 45. Orville moved into Hawthorn Hill, the family mansion in nearby Oakwood, in 1914, sold the Wright Company in 1915, and continued to serve aviation as an elder statesman until his death on January 30, 1948. Today the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park preserves the Wright Cycle Company building, Hawthorn Hill and Huffman Prairie Flying Field.

The First Flight

To test their gliders, the Wrights needed steady wind, soft sand and privacy. They found all three at Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where they flew gliders in 1900, 1901 and 1902. The 1902 glider, with three-axis control, solved the problem of controlling an aircraft in the air. All that remained was to add power.

On the morning of December 17, 1903, at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, Orville piloted the Wright Flyer on a flight of 12 seconds covering 120 feet, the first sustained, controlled flight of a powered, heavier-than-air machine. The brothers took turns making three more flights that day. The longest, flown by Wilbur, lasted 59 seconds and covered 852 feet. Five witnesses from the local lifesaving station watched, and Orville sent a telegram home to their father in Dayton announcing their success.

The brothers returned to Dayton and turned Huffman Prairie, a cow pasture east of the city, into their test field. There, in 1904 and 1905, they learned to fly in the true sense: turning, circling and staying aloft. On October 5, 1905, Wilbur flew 24 miles in just over 39 minutes in the Wright Flyer III, which the brothers considered the first practical airplane. Public demonstrations in France and at Fort Myer, Virginia, in 1908 brought them worldwide fame, and in 1909 the U.S. Army bought its first airplane from the Wrights.

Our Aircraft

Wright “B” Flyer, Inc. keeps this Dayton heritage alive with three aircraft based on the Wright Model B, the airplane that launched America’s aviation industry.

The Brown Bird (Wright “B” Flyer No. 001)

The project to build the Brown Bird was the beginning of Wright “B” Flyer, Inc. In 1973 a group of aviation enthusiasts at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base set out to build a flyable lookalike of the Wright brothers’ first production airplane. Construction began in 1975, and the airplane first flew in 1982. Because no detailed drawings of the original Model B survived, the builders used the Model B at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force as their template, and designed the airplane with modern engineering and materials to meet today’s airworthiness standards. The result has a steel structure, ailerons instead of wing warping, a control wheel, and a 225-horsepower Lycoming engine. Volunteers first nicknamed it the “Iron Bird” and later the “Brown Bird” for its brown-painted surfaces. After decades of flying at airshows and events, it is now on static display in our museum.

The Valentine Flyer

The Valentine Flyer is one of several Wright replicas that Tom and Nancy Valentine of California built for the 1978 television movie The Winds of Kitty Hawk. Patterned after the Model B at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, it is much closer to a true replica than the Brown Bird: it banks using wing warping, just as the original did, though it is powered by a 1929 Ford Model A engine. After the movie it was displayed in Long Beach alongside the Spruce Goose and at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. Wright “B” Flyer volunteer Don Gum brought it to the attention of the organization, and with funding from the Greene County Commission and Inventing Flight it was purchased in 2001. It has since been displayed at the Farnborough International Air Show in England and was the star of the 2010 centennial of Lt. Benjamin Foulois’ first solo flight at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. It is on display at the Wright “B” Flyer Museum in Miamisburg, Ohio.

The White Bird

The White Bird is our newest flying Wright Model B lookalike. With invitations to fly at national and international venues growing and the Brown Bird aging, a generous donor with a passion for aviation heritage funded the design and construction of a new airplane. It was built in our museum and hangar in Miamisburg, with wings built to our specifications by Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) Chapter 5 of Middlefield, Ohio, and with donated or reduced-price services, supplies and parts from many local businesses. The White Bird first flew in the fall of 2021 and completed its test program in 2022. Since then it has flown at the Dayton Air Show, in parade and car show flyovers, on a cross-country flight to Batavia, Ohio, and over Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and historic Huffman Prairie, where the Wright brothers learned to fly.

To see these aircraft in person, visit us at the Wright “B” Flyer Museum. For more about Wilbur and Orville Wright, see our Wright Brothers Links page.