The Bishop's Boys Who Taught the World to Fly

In the winter of 1878, a clergyman named Milton Wright came home to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, carrying a small toy for his two youngest sons. It was a model helicopter, about 1 ft (30 cm) long, made of paper, bamboo, and cork, powered by nothing more than a twisted rubber band — a design based on an invention by the French aeronautical pioneer Alphonse Pénaud. Wilbur and Orville played with it until it broke, then built their own. Decades later, they would point to that broken toy as the spark that set their lives toward the sky.

Wilbur was born near Millville, Indiana, in 1867, and Orville in Dayton, Ohio, in 1871 — two of seven children born to Milton Wright and Susan Catherine Koerner. Neither Wright child had a middle name; their father instead chose distinctive first names, naming his sons after clergymen he admired, Willbur Fisk and Orville Dewey. In Dayton, neighbors simply called them 'the bishop's boys.' Neither brother ever married.

Neither Wilbur nor Orville finished high school with a diploma in hand. A family move from Richmond, Indiana, to Dayton in 1884 cut short Wilbur's schooling just after four years; his diploma would not be awarded until April 16, 1994, posthumously, on what would have been his 127th birthday. In late 1885 or early 1886, Wilbur was struck in the face with a hockey stick during an ice-skating game, losing his front teeth. Once vigorous and athletic, he withdrew, spending years largely housebound, caring for his tubercular mother and reading deeply in his father's library.

Orville, meanwhile, dropped out of high school to start a printing business in 1889, building his own press with Wilbur's help. The brothers soon launched a weekly newspaper together. Their mechanical instincts, sharpened first in printing and later in a Dayton bicycle shop, gave them a practical education no university could offer. Working for years with presses, bicycles, and motors, they developed the hands-on skill that would prove essential to solving what they called 'the flying problem.'

Starting around 1890, the two bicycle mechanics began systematically studying everything that might explain how birds fly. Finding little of use in existing scientific literature, they turned to the careful notes of German engineer Otto Lilienthal, who had tested gliders from a hill near Berlin and demonstrated that a fixed wing in contact with the air was essential to controlled flight. In 1895, the Smithsonian Institution supplied the Wrights with Lilienthal's lift-and-drag tables along with a wind-tunnel study by Wenham and John Browning from 1871 — America's effort to keep pace in the emerging science of aviation.