Orville Wright

Orville Wright was born in Dayton, OhioOhioOhio is a state in the Midwestern United States; its capital is Columbus. It joined the Union in 1803 as the 17th state, the first carved from the Northwest Territory, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 11,799,448.Open the full entry, on August 19, 1871, to Milton Wright and Susan Koerner Wright. He was the sixth of seven children, five of whom survived infancy. His father, Milton Wright, was a bishop in the United Brethren Church.⁠[1][2]

In 1878 their father gave him and Wilbur Wright a rubber-band-powered toy helicopter designed by Alphonse Pénaud, which sparked the brothers’ interest in flight.⁠[1][2]

He attended school in IowaIowaIowa is a state in the Midwestern United States; its capital and largest city is Des Moines. It was admitted to the Union on December 28, 1846, as the 29th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 3,190,369.Open the full entry, IndianaIndianaIndiana is a state in the Midwestern United States; its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. It was admitted to the Union on December 11, 1816, as the 19th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 6,785,528.Open the full entry and Dayton. At Central High School in Dayton he was in a class with the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, but he never graduated because he lacked several required credits, leaving high school in the 11th grade.⁠[1][2]

Printing was one of Orville Wright’s youthful hobbies; with his friend Ed Sines he produced a brief newspaper for their eighth-grade classmates. A postcard he sent his father in 1881, at the age of nine, is the earliest known communication from either brother in the Wright papers at the Library of Congress.⁠[3]

Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright opened a printing shop in west Dayton that printed advertising and news circulars and moved to the Hoover Block in 1890. From May 1889 to August 1890 the brothers published two newspapers, the West Side News and the Evening Item. They sold the press and type in 1899.⁠[1]

The brothers then went into bicycle repair and sales; their Wright Cycle Company also designed and manufactured bicycles, and the business became their main source of income and funded their flight experiments. Encyclopaedia BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry dates the opening of the bicycle shop to 1892, while the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park page gives spring 1893. The brothers left the bicycle business in 1908.⁠[4][1][5]

The death of Otto Lilienthal in a glider accident in 1896, together with Samuel Langley’s experiments that year, renewed the brothers’ interest in flight. In 1899, after Wilbur Wright wrote to the Smithsonian InstitutionSmithsonian InstitutionThe Smithsonian Institution is a museum, education and research institution created by the U.S. Congress in 1846 with the bequest of the English scientist James Smithson. Based in Washington, D.C., it runs museums such as the National Air and Space Museum and the National Museum of Natural History, as well as the National Zoo.Open the full entry, they began serious aviation research.⁠[1][2][5]

Between 1900 and 1902 they built and flew three biplane gliders to master flight control. The tests took place around Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks of North Carolina; on August 16, 1900, J. J. Dosher of the Weather Bureau had written to Wilbur Wright about the test-site options there. The brothers made more than a thousand glides from atop Big Kill Devil Hill.⁠[6][3][7]

Their key innovation was pilot-operated wing warping, which gave control over the aircraft’s attitude.⁠[4]

On December 14, 1903, the brothers tossed a coin to decide who would fly first. Wilbur Wright won, but after leaving the launching rail he oversteered the elevator; the machine climbed too steeply, stalled and dove into the sand, and repairs were needed before another attempt.⁠[7]

At 10:35 a.m. on December 17, at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, North CarolinaNorth CarolinaNorth Carolina is a state in the South Atlantic region of the United States; its capital is Raleigh and its largest city is Charlotte. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on November 21, 1789, becoming the 12th state, and its population in the 2020 census was 10,439,388.Open the full entry, Orville Wright took off into a 27 mph headwind while Wilbur Wright steadied the wings as the machine ran down the rail. The flight lasted 12 seconds and covered about 120 feet from the rail, at a groundspeed of 6.8 mph and an airspeed of 34 mph. John Daniels of the nearby lifesaving station photographed the moment with a camera Orville Wright had set up in advance.⁠[7][6][3]

The brothers took turns and flew four times that day; the last flight, by Wilbur Wright, covered 852 feet in 59 seconds. The 40-foot, 605-pound machine had double tails and elevators; after the last flight a gust of wind rolled it over and damaged it beyond easy repair. The brothers then telegraphed their father with the day’s results.⁠[7]

In January 1904 the brothers began building a new machine, which they were testing at Huffman Prairie, east of Dayton, by early summer. Their 1905 machine could turn, bank and circle and stayed aloft for more than 35 minutes; Encyclopaedia Britannica describes it as the first fully practical airplane.⁠[3][1][6][8]

On May 22, 1906, the brothers’ patent for their flying machine was granted, more than three years after the original application of 1903.⁠[3]

In 1908 Orville Wright made demonstration flights for the U.S. Army at Fort Myer, VirginiaVirginiaVirginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state whose capital is Richmond. It entered the Union on June 25, 1788, as the 10th state, and had a population of 8,631,393 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, while Wilbur Wright flew demonstrations in France. During the Fort Myer trials the machine crashed, killing his passenger, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, and leaving Orville Wright with a broken thigh and pelvis that caused him pain for the rest of his life.⁠[3][1]

In July 1909, after Orville Wright flew a demonstration for the U.S. Army, the brothers sold their first airplane for $30,000. Encyclopaedia Britannica describes the machine sold to the U.S. Army Signal Corps as the world’s first military airplane.⁠[9][4]

That year the brothers founded the Wright Company to market their airplanes, with Wilbur Wright as president and Orville Wright as a vice-president; the company built airplanes for the U.S. Army.⁠[1][6]

In 1911 Orville Wright set a soaring record of nine minutes and forty-five seconds at Kitty Hawk, which stood for ten years.⁠[2]

After Wilbur Wright died of typhoid in 1912, Orville Wright became president of the Wright Company. He sold his interest in 1915 and stayed on for a year as a consulting engineer. The company later merged with the company of Glenn H. Curtiss.⁠[1][6]

In 1914 he moved with his sister Katharine Wright and their father to Hawthorn Hill in Oakwood, near Dayton. He later ran a laboratory on Broadway in west Dayton.⁠[1]

On March 3, 1915, Congress established the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which later became the foundation of NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the U.S. federal agency responsible for the civilian space program, aeronautics research and space science. Established by law in 1958 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has run programs including Mercury, the Apollo Moon landings, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station and Artemis.Open the full entry, through a rider to Navy appropriation legislation. Orville Wright was a charter member of the NACA’s executive committee; a biography published by ASME says he served on the committee for 28 years. He also served on several other aviation commissions and boards.⁠[10][9][1]

In 1930 Orville Wright received the first Daniel Guggenheim Medal for major achievements in aeronautics.⁠[9]

In 1932 the Wright Memorial at Kill Devil Hills was dedicated; Orville Wright attended the ceremony but did not give a speech.⁠[2]

On April 1, 1941, during the German bombing of London, M. J. B. Davy, director of the Science Museum in London, wrote to Orville Wright to assure him that the 1903 machine was safe; by then it had been on display in England for thirteen years.⁠[3]

Orville Wright died of a heart attack in Dayton on January 30, 1948, at the age of 76, and was buried in Woodland Cemetery in Dayton.⁠[1][2]

He had instructed that the original 1903 machine be given to the United States National Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, and news of the donation came on the day he died. The Smithsonian Institution Archives judges that the donation ended a long dispute between the Wright brothers and the Smithsonian over which machine was the first capable of carrying a person in flight under its own power.⁠[11]

Orville Wright never married. His siblings who survived infancy were his older brothers Reuchlin Wright, Lorin Wright and Wilbur Wright and his younger sister Katharine Wright; he was especially close to Wilbur Wright and Katharine Wright.⁠[1][5][2]

Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright received honorary doctorates from Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry, Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry and other schools.⁠[2]

The National Park Service maintains two sites honoring the Wright brothers: Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park in Dayton, which includes the Wright-Dunbar Interpretive Center and the Huffman Prairie Interpretive Center and Flying Field, and Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, with the monument on Big Kill Devil Hill, the boulder marking the first-flight site and the flight line where the brothers landed.⁠[12][13]

Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park: Official website: https://www.nps.gov/daav/index.htm (opens in a new window).⁠[12]

Wright Brothers National Memorial: Official website: https://www.nps.gov/wrbr/index.htm (opens in a new window).⁠[13]