 The Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, were two American brothers, inventors, and aviation pioneers who were credited with inventing and building the world's first successful powered airplane.  Their parents were part Dutch, Swiss, English and German.  Neither went to university or ever married.

 There were 7 children in their family. Wilbur was the 3 rd child was born in 1867 and Orville the 6 th in  In 1878 their father, a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, brought home a toy “helicopter “ which the brothers said was what motivated them.  Aged 18 Wilbur lost his front teeth while playing ice hockey. While not serious he stayed at home for a couple of years to look after his mother who was sick with tuberculosis.  Because of his injury he did not attend Yale as planned.

 Orville dropped out of high school after his third year to start a newspaper business in 1889, having designed and built his own printing press with Wilbur's help.  Wilbur joined the shop, and in March the brothers started a weekly newspaper, the West Side News.  Later issues named Orville as publisher and Wilbur as editor.  In April 1890 they changed the paper to a daily, The Evening Item, but it lasted only four months because it wasn’t successful.

 The brothers opened a repair and sales shop in December 1892 called the Wright Cycle Exchange which changed to the Wright Cycle Company and began manufacturing their own brand in  They did this because of the bike craze in 1890s which was started by the invention of the safety bicycle and its advantages over the penny-farthing design.  The Bicycles also gave them ideas for their plane like the way of shifting your weight from one side to the other to turn.

 In the 1890s they saw newspaper articles and photographs of the dramatic glides by Otto Lilienthal in Germany.  1896 brought three important flying events.  Samuel Langley successfully flew an unmanned steam- powered fixed-wing model aircraft.  Octave Chanute and others flew gliders over the sand dunes along the shore of Lake Michigan.  In August, Lilienthal was killed in the fall of his glider.  In May 1899 Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Museum requesting Lilienthal’s reports and flight test results.

 Despite Lilienthal's death, the brothers liked his idea to practice gliding in order to master the art of Control which they believed was the last unsolved part of "the flying problem".  The Wrights improved on Lilienthal's idea of practice and balance.  Wilbur saw that birds changed the angle of the ends of their wings to make their bodies roll right or left. The brothers decided this would also be a good way for a flying machine to turn—to "bank" or "lean" into the turn just like a bird—and just like a person riding a bicycle.  Equally important, they hoped this method would enable recovery when the wind tilted the machine to one side.

 Other aeronautical investigators regarded flight as if it were not so different from surface locomotion, except the surface would be elevated.  They imagined that any flying machine would remain essentially level in the air, as did a train or an car or a ship at the surface. The idea of deliberately leaning, or rolling, to one side like on a bicycle did not enter their thinking.  The Wright brothers wanted the pilot to have absolute control. They deliberately designed their 1903 first powered flyer with drooping wings, which are unstable, but less vulnerable to upset by gusty winds.

 On December 14, 1903 Wilbur made a three-second flight attempt. He won a coin toss to go first but he stalled after takeoff.  On December 17, 1903 the both men finally took to the air.  The first flight, by Orville at 10:35 am, of 37 m in 12 seconds, at a speed of only 10.9 km/h over the ground, was recorded in a famous photograph.  The next two flights covered approximately 53 m and 61 m by Wilbur and Orville respectively. Their altitude was about 3.0 m above the ground.

“Wilbur started the fourth and last flight at just about 12 o'clock. The first few hundred feet were up and down, as before, but by the time three hundred ft had been covered, the machine was under much better control. However, when out about eight hundred feet the machine began pitching again, and, in one of its darts downward, struck the ground. The distance over the ground was measured to be 852 feet; the time of the flight was 59 seconds. “  Five people witnessed the flights: One was John T. Daniels (who took the famous "first flight" photo using Orville's pre-positioned camera). Another was Johnny Moore, a teenage boy who lived in the area.

 Wilbur became ill on a business trip to Boston in April This was thought by some to be due to eating bad shellfish at a banquet.  After returning to Dayton, he was diagnosed with typhoid fever. He lingered in and out of consciousness for several weeks until he died at home on May 30, at age 45.  His father wrote about Wilbur : "A short life, full of consequences. An unfailing intellect, imperturbable temper, great self-reliance and as great modesty, seeing the right clearly, pursuing it steadfastly, he lived and died."[

 On Wilbur's death Orville took over the Wright Company but sold it in 1915 moving to Ohio with his father and his sister Katharine. She married in 1926 upsetting Orville. He refused to talk to her but for many years. He finally agreed to see just before she died of pneumonia in  Orville made his last flight as a pilot in He retired from business and became an elder statesman of aviation.  On April 19, 1944 a plane, piloted by Howard Hughes and Jack Frye, flew from Burbank, California, to Washington, D.C. On the return trip, the airliner stopped at Wright Field to give Orville Wright his last airplane flight, more than 40 years after his historic first flight. He may even have briefly handled the controls.

 Orville died on January 30, 1948, after his second heart attack. He had lived from the horse-and-buggy age to the dawn of supersonic flight.  He was followed a day later by John T. Daniels, the Coast Guardsman who took their famous first flight photo.  Both brothers are buried at the family plot at Woodland Cemetery, Dayton, Ohio.