The Impact that Wright Brothers Made on Nowadays Aviation Industry

The Wright brothers were remarkable people during the early 1900’s as they were the first to invent, build, and fly an aircraft. Putting a man in the sky was a mission that both Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright were destined to accomplish. The Wright brothers had accomplished a lot during their lives, and a lot for aviation. They were the catalyst to advances in aviation that was never seen before, spreading their ideas to brilliant minds around the globe. The Wright brothers have an interesting background that brought them into the art of flight. Coming from an unrelated field of building bicycles to building the first controllable glider, we have learned a lot and have stemmed off their discoveries of how they eventually mastered the art of flight through their aircraft.

First, the Wright brothers were a not from a place where people expected aviation to be born from. Nor did they think that the Wright brothers would be the ones to discover flight. Wilbur and Orville Wright were originally from Dayton, OH. The Wright brothers believed that they had an advantage growing up in Ohio, Wilbur once said in a quote from 1904, “If I were to give a young man advice as to how he might succeed in life, I would say to him, pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio.” Before the Wright brothers started to try and invent a flyable aircraft, they had jobs that would both fund and help manufacture these crafts.

The Wright brothers were not aviation inventors from the start, they had varying jobs that helped not only fund their ideas, but also give them a mechanical background to make these aircraft. Surprisingly, neither Wilbur nor Orville attended college. Wilbur was going to attend Yale University; however, those plans came to a halt after a devastating hockey accident that left him injured in 1885-1886. In 1889 the brothers opened a newspaper company called West Side News, later in 1892 they opened a bicycle shop fixing and building their own bikes. These two companies were a good source of income to fund their inventions later. Also, not only was this bike company a financial benefit to them, but it also gave them the skills to be the inventors of their aircrafts and build their own mechanics for them. This would save them money from labor costs of finding someone that could build these crafts for them. While they were working, they were closely observing Otto Lilienthal’s research and when he had died in a glider crash, they moved to Kitty Hawk, NC where there were high winds that would help them with their inventions.

The Wright brothers main mission was to build a controllable aircraft. They ran into many obstacles when they started building their own gliders. To understand how to get complete control of their aircraft they built wind tunnels and made model wings all shapes and sizes with different materials to see how they reacted in an airstream.

One way they mastered flight was by first figuring out how to control the aircraft. This was the one thing that no other person in history had ever done in aviation. People had learned how to get in the air, but no one knew how to control it. The Wright brothers came up with a technique called wing warping. Wing warping was being able to twist the wings using a series of cables that would control the roll of the plane. After successfully mastering wing warping the Wright Brothers added a moveable rudder. The moveable rudder allowed them to control the aggressive yaw the plane would normally do. Their discoveries would be the foundation to all aviation advances that were to come. There is no flying machine that does not follow these basic principles discovered by the Wrights.