The Best Homebuilders

[Bill Greenwood]

Most people would agree the Wright brothers were the first homebuilders of a powered plane that a man could actually fly in and control, to some extent. Within a few years they made enough progress that their planes really flew, no doubt about that, and could fly for miles and make turns.

FLIGHT TRAINING, 7/10 has a good article by LeRoy Cook about how they developed control of the wings. I would also call the Wrights, the best homebuilders since they did what no one else in history had done, and they did it in a logical, scientific progression, not just following some half baked hunch.
They smartly began with gliders and correctly surmised that flying was more about the wing than an engine especially in those days.
They knew they needed some way to control the wings side to side to make turns and/or offset the unbalancing of a wing due to a gust on one side. Wilbur studied how hawks and other birds flew and noticed they twisted or warped their wing tips, that is up on one side and down on the other to turn or counteract a gust. Thus they made their glider with the same twisting flexibility or "wing warping".
Their engine of that day was barely good enough to fly, but their props were pretty effective.

It is great to go to Dayton to their old home, shop, and Huffman flying field outside town, and walk where genius did, and hope a little rubs off. Of course, it is a fad nowadays to claim some others might have had some contraption that might have flown, but we know for sure that they did.
The Wrights were practical men, not just dreamers and in 1906 the U S govt awarded them a patent, and they offfered their plane for sale.
Now how much would it cost?
How much would the first boat cost if it was the only one in the world that could float?
How much should Babe Ruth's contract be the year he hit 31 more home runs than the next best ENTIRE TEAM DID?
The 1906 price was $20,000 which is an astonishing $457,000 in 2010 dollars. The brothers knew what they had even if much of the rest of the world did not.

Glen Curtiss didn't want to pay the price so he built his own plane with little wings on the ends for control. The French also used the "little wings" on the tips and their word for them was "aileron".
The Wrights argued in court that Curtis violated their patent even if the design did the same thing, but mechanically different and I believe the court ruled for the Wrights.
Curtiss had some very successful motorcycles, in fact his cycle of 1903 at 64 mph and 1907 at a stunning 136 mph top speed could easily outrun any airplane of that time, and he later came up with some good performing planes, around 1910 and so on.

So the next time you make a turn, keep them in mind, and the next time you think a plane is priced too high, think about that $20,000 for the first one. If you want to get some real daydreaming, think what price a genuine and intact original Wright Flyer would sell for today, it would be in the $millions.

[Floatsflyer]

The Wrights were very smart, highly intelligent, great thinkers, esteemed aeronautical engineers and impressive tinkerers but they were horrible businessmen. Of all the early aircraft pioneers, the Wrights were the least successful, in fact they failed miserably at creating evolutionary aircraft and new ideas and hence an unsustainable business mode.

The bright light of history shines darkly on the Wrights. Their downfall can be ironically traced to receiving that Patent in 1906. From 1905-1912 they produced the same basic and outdated model, although their Model 1 tractor was more conventional. During this period they were spending far more time in court proceedings protecting that patent from infringement than in the factory developing newer and better models with significant improvements. Hence the other early pioneers were leaving them far far behind.

Curtiss, Fokker, Bleriot, Stearman, Cessna, Sopwith, Voisin, AV Roe, Farman, Royal Aircraft Factory, Zeppelin, Vickers, Thomas Bros. Handley Page, Boeing, deHavilland, Deperdussin, Daimler and Laird to name a few, left the Wrights in their rear view mirror. So much so that by 1912 and after Wilbur's death, the Wright Aeronautical Company had become just an engine manufacturing company. Just a very short 9 years. Lesson to be learned: If you litigate rather than innovate, you die.