Orville and Wilber Wright

    Avid kite flyers as children, Wilber and Orville Wright developed this love into the first successful airplane. In August of 1899, building on Hargrave's wing, they built a biplane kite and discovered that by varying the position of the four lines that they could simulate the twisting wings of a soaring bird. This characterized Wright’s airplane for years to come.

     The Wright brothers were by no means the only people trying to build an aeroplane; they were simply the first to achieve powered and controllable flight. There were still many fanciful designs being touted as the solution to the problem of powered flight (human powered, flapping wings built onto a bicycle being but one example), but in the main the advocates of powered flight were making gradual but definite progress towards overcoming the intricacies of lift, thrust, drag, stability, and control. The Wright's design had the advantage of awesome control, but as if to make up for it and keep the competition fair, they had to overcome a terrible burden of reducing a lot of weight.

    The Wright brothers eventually overcame their weight problems and flew an aeroplane of their own design in 1903. This was the climax of several years of experimentation using kites and gliders. The wing warping system they used to control their aeroplane had been developed by flying their smaller versions as kites, and twisting the wings with four lines from the ground. Because of their extensive flying of their designs as kites, and their use of wind tunnels to test ideas about wings and propellers, they were able to collect a great deal of information about the stability of their designs, as well as the amount of lift the glider developed for a given wind. This gave them invaluable information about the necessary size and curvature for the wings of their 1903 "flyer".

    Unlike Alexander Graham Bell and others who were looking for safe, stable flight, the Wright brothers looked for an unstable craft that could be controlled by steering. After their successful flight in December of 1903 and the establishment of manned flight, and of course, the kite lost much of its scientific popularity soon thereafter.