Other Firsts: Wright Brothers' First Flight
Playful Discovery
Wilbur and Orville Wright were brothers who became lifelong friends and business partners. Many siblings and partnerships are torn apart by the rivalries and pressures that come so naturally when people are so close for so long; but the Wrights maintained a close bond that brought them joy.
Their business career started with a local print shop and newspaper[*]as did fellow inventors like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison where they used a printing press they built using some scrap materials[*]They first formed a partnership with Ed Sines, a friend who had a small printing press. As their business grew, they built this larger press.. When they started a bicycle shop, they learned how to repair a wide variety of problems quickly, design and manufacture lightweight machines, play with many mechanical things, and stay fit and strong in bicycle races. It was by playing with a box for a bicycle inner tube that Wilbur developed the idea of "wing warping" to guide the flight of their airplane.
Once they committed to building a flying machine, they learned as much as they could about flying and flying machines. They started small, with box kites, then gliders. As they made larger and more complex designs, they learned that some of the accepted calculations for the lift of a wing were wrong - so they designed, built, and used their own small wind tunnel. And when they found how strong and how light an engine they needed, there weren't any they could buy - so they designed their own engine.
Until their first successful flight (in 1903), they avoided the spotlight. Working conditions were rough, and they were funding it all themselves through their profits from the bicycle shop. But it seems they learned something new nearly every day, and were inspired by each discovery.
Their lives tell a story worth knowing, and worth following in many ways.
From the time we were little children, my brother Orville and myself lived together, worked together, and in fact, thought together."
- Wilbur Wright
This image © 2022 TALLabs using a 
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Original Image: NASA (one of many links to this public-domain image)
Cropped, and heavily edited to be a black and white line drawing rather than a photo.