THE WRIGHT BROTHERS AS AERONAUTICAL 

 ENGINEERS ^ 



By M. P. Baker 



Assistant Technical Adviser to the Wright Estate; Project Engineer, Inland Manu- 

 facturing Division, General Motors Corp. 



[With 9 plates] 



Almost by accident, a little over a year ago, I was asked to explain 

 the working principle of some of the Wright wind-timnel instruments 

 and, upon encountering some difficulty, was given complete access to 

 the libraiy material of the late Orville Wright. Since this material 

 included such a wealth of technical detail pertaining to the develop- 

 ment of the first airplane and to the engineering ability of the Wriglit 

 brothers, permission was sought, and granted, to reveal it in a paper 

 for this society. For the most part, these technical details have never 

 been published heretofore. 



Wilbur Wright has said that his active interest in aeronautics dated 

 back to the account of Lilienthal's fatal glider accident in 1896. After 

 studying all the literature that was handily available on the subject 

 of aeronautics, he aroused an equal interest in his brother Orville, and 

 the two of them drew some rather positive conclusions from what they 

 had read : 



1. A fixed-wing structure was far more practical than any scheme 

 of flapping the wings. 



2. The customary method of obtaining longitudinal and lateral con- 

 trol merely by shifting the operator's weight on the craft was highly 

 inadequate. They felt that such a system necessitated a degree of 

 skill and dexterity that was impossible to attain. 



3. By proportioning a wing on the basis of known lift and drag 

 characteristics of a chosen curved surface, and by providing a manual 

 system for longitudinal and lateral control, one should be able to build 

 an efficient glider in which considerable flight experience could be 

 safely accumulated. 



The solution to the longitudinal control had been given previously 

 by the horizontal "rudder" patent issued jointly to Chanute and Mouil- 



' Paper presented at the National Aeronautic Meeting of the Society of Automotive Engineers, April 

 17-20, 1950. Reprinted by permisision of the SAE. 



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