Wilbur Wright

Wilbur Wright solved the problem of controlling an aircraft, which is the part nobody else was working on. He was the elder brother, born in Indiana in 1867, and by common account the more analytical of the two. A hockey stick to the face at eighteen ended his plan to go to Yale and left him at home for years nursing his dying mother and reading his father's library, which is where the education came from. The brothers printed a newspaper, sold and built bicycles, and began reading aeronautics seriously in 1899 after the death of Otto Lilienthal. Their insight was that the difficulty was not lift or power but balance: an aircraft is an unstable machine that has to be flown, and every rival was trying to build one that would fly itself. Wilbur worked out wing-warping by twisting an inner-tube box, which became three-axis control and is on every aeroplane since. They built their own wind tunnel in 1901 after finding the published lift tables wrong, and tested some two hundred wing sections. Orville made the first powered flight on 17 December 1903 because he won the toss; Wilbur flew 260 metres the same morning. He then did most of the public flying. His demonstrations in France in 1908 converted a sceptical Europe in a fortnight. He spent his last years in patent litigation against Glenn Curtiss and others, which exhausted him and which his father said had worn him down. He died of typhoid in 1912 at forty-five, and Orville always held that the lawsuits had killed him.

• Lived: 1867 CE – 1912 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: inventor, aviator