Achieving Liftoff: How the Wright Brothers Jumpstarted the 20th Century
How the invention of flight symbolized and energized innovation at the turn of the century
No one captures the spirit of 20th-century innovation like the Wright Brothers. Not only did they take incredible risks to become the first people to fly. But they were entirely self-driven; received no major backing, had no formal training, and weren’t affiliated with a major institution. Even their personalities are something of a caricature: As the sons of a pastor, they are the perfect embodiment of the Protestant Work ethic; Their names, Wilbur and Orville, sound like something a Hollywood writer would dream up for midwestern engineers; And their demure wardrobe, perfectly designed not to attract attention, mimics Tin Tin’s bumbling bureaucrats Thompson and Thompson.
While their story is immensely fascinating in its own right, no pun intended, and worth an entire book (in fact, I highly recommend David McCullough’s The Wright Brothers1), here I want to situate their story within the broader context of the turn of the Century. My goal, as part of the longer story I’m looking to tell this year, is to set a baseline for technology at the start of the 20th Century. And, what better way to do it than with two brothers who kicked off the Century by achieving one of humanity’s greatest dreams?
Setting the Stage: Life Just Before 1900
Though often slandered as the ‘Gilded Age,’ the latter half of the 19th Century was one of the greatest eras humanity has ever known. This was the era when the globe’s GDP curve was beginning to lift. In the US, incomes tripled between the 1890s and the 2010s.2 And, technology was transforming society; By 1920, the same percentage of families that had had running water in 1890 now had a radio. Vaclav Smil calls this period the ‘Age of Synergy’ as it was the era in which many of the technologies we take for granted were invented, including:3
Electric lightbulb (commercialized by Edison, 1879)
Telephone (Alexander Graham Bell, 1876)
Internal combustion engine (Otto-cycle engine, 1876)
Electric generator/dynamo (Zénobe Gramme, 1870s)
Alternating current (AC) power systems (Tesla/Westinghouse, 1880s)
Automobile (Benz’s Motorwagen, 1885–86)
Motion pictures (Edison’s Kinetoscope, 1891; Lumière brothers, 1895)
Wireless telegraphy (Marconi, late 1890s)
Interestingly, these inventions occurred in a decentralized manner. Today, we often think of ‘invention’ as being primarily done at universities, incubators, or venture capital-backed start-ups. But none of these were prominent at this time. The Ivy League was still producing theologians, and venture capital had effectively died out as whale funds turned to cotton. Consequently, most innovation was undertaken by entrepreneurs on the side, often with funding from angel investors or local businesses.
The Early Years
The Wright brothers embodied this world perfectly. Neither rich nor aristocratic, they were two of the seven children born to Milton Wright, an itinerant evangelical minister who finally settled down in Dayton, Ohio, in 1884. Like their father, the men were religious, neither smoked nor gambled, and avoided hard liquor. Awkward and aloof, they showed little interest in women and were content with each other’s company.
Although often referred to together, the two brothers did have distinct personalities. Wilbur, born in 1867, was the older and more academic of the two. As a child, he seemed to be set for a ‘normal’ career, beginning with college. However, a malicious ice hockey accident injured him badly, causing him to miss school and leaving him depressed. Though he would eventually rebound, he chose not to finish high school and never attended university. Although an excellent public speaker, he remained quiet and guarded, and was said to live ‘in his own world.’
Orville, born in 1971, was the younger, moodier brother. He, too, forwent graduating from high school to pursue a printing business, making newspapers for the local town. Though generally more gentle and extroverted than Wilbur, Orville was prone to periods of depression in which he was angry and cruel.
The two brothers opened a bike shop in 1892, seeking to capitalize on the newfound biking craze sweeping the country (in yet another example of life changing during the period). Perfectionists and tinkerers, they became dissatisfied with existing designs and created their own bicycle design in 1896, to much acclaim. While Orville wanted to expand into automobiles, Wilbur hated them, keeping them focused on bicycles.
Flying was not something the average person thought about a lot at the time. In the late 1890s, there was a public trial of unmanned gliders, which received little public fanfare. But it had intrigued the brothers’ attention. The intrigue turned to passion when, in 1896, Otto Lillenthal, a German entrepreneur, died attempting to glide with one of his inventions.
Taking Off
As their interest in flight evolved into an obsession, the brothers gradually began researching flight and building prototypes in a process that seems remarkably quaint today. They mailed the Smithsonian, via snail mail, to receive the latest research on flight. Not finding much of value, they focused heavily on birds and the curvature of their wings. They then began to build gliders, slowly testing out different designs.
By 1900, the two brothers had begun building prototypes, using the bike shop as their venture capital firm to fund their investments. They were aided by their sister, Katherine, who lived with them and took care of all the household tasks and administrative duties in their lives. This enabled the brothers to focus their efforts on flight, as by this time they talked of little else. The brothers were inveterate workaholics, working and speaking of nothing other than flight.4
The initial prototypes were little more than gliders, however. To get things off the ground, the brothers needed to figure out how to design the wings. More specifically, how to warp the wings in order to best accommodate the draft. To understand this, they became obsessed with birds, comparing buzzards and eagles in terms of their ability and their ability to hold an equilibrium in strong winds, for example.
The brothers knew that to get anywhere, they would have to overcome two obstacles. First, they had no data. There were no physics books laying out formulas for aerodynamics. And, there were no wind tunnels to test prototypes. Like kids with paper airplanes, they could only hypothesize and test static designs - nothing that allowed a rider to change or alter the wings in flight, as birds do. Overcoming the lack of data meant doing a lot of tests and recording the results. And, conducting a lot of tests meant finding a place where they could test their glider without damaging it. Or worse, experiencing Lillethal’s fate.
In thinking about the ideal testing grounds, the brothers hit upon three criteria:
Hills, from which to take off
Wind, to propel the glider
Sand, to break their fall and avoid Lillenthal’s fate
As much as they loved Ohio, there was no such place nearby. Again, using snail mail, the brothers reached out to the National Weather Service, which suggested Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. A more random place is hard to imagine. The brothers, having never left the Midwest, had to pack up all their gear and head by rail (again, Wilbur really hated automobiles) to North Carolina and assemble their equipment, sight unseen.
While the site of their tests may seem incidental, it has led to a branding war between the two states that has lasted ever since, with each attempting to claim the birthplace of flight. Interestingly, the brothers had a lot of ambivalence about Kitty Hawk. While the brothers made friends there and felt it suited their needs, the storms and bugs were overwhelming. Speaking of the mosquitoes, Orville wrote:5
The sand and grass and trees and hills and everything was fairly covered with them. They chewed us clear through our underwear and socks. Lumps began swelling all over my body like hen’s eggs…Our blankets [which they’d used to hide from the mosquitoes] then became unbearable. The perspiration would roll off of us in torrents. We would partly uncover and the mosquitoes would swoop down upon us in vast multitudes. We would make a few desperate and vain slaps, and again retire behind our blankets. Misery! Misery!
Nevertheless, they persisted. By the following year, 1901, they had progressed from a glider and were now attempting to use a motor. Critically, they achieved their advancements in large part by unlearning much of what had been written before. Often relying on previous data from tests, winds, and wing curvatures, they increasingly found these to be entirely useless, having to test and record everything themselves.
Upon returning to Dayton, the two began to work on a motor suitable for flight. In doing so, they designed a motor unlike any other – it had no carburetor or spark plugs, and yet, it functioned precisely as they needed it to. In this, the motor was emblematic of their plane: they built every inch of it themselves. While all inventors stand on the shoulders of giants, and Newton once remarked, the Wrights were singular in how little they borrowed from others. Incredibly, their most significant source of information seems to have been ornithologists’ work on bird designs. Speaking of modern calculations on data, Wilber noted they were ‘worthless.’
Despite these headwinds, in 1903 they returned to Kitty Hawk with an updated wing design and a working motor. After several brutal weeks battling the elements, they achieved the world’s first powered flight, clocking in at 57 seconds. The brothers were ecstatic. They had proved that their dreams were possible.
The rest of the world was less impressed. Residents of Kitty Hawk seemed to view their annual visitors with a bemused interest, while Dayton’s journalists told the brothers to come back when the flight was “57 minutes.” However, their success in Kitty Hawk emboldened the brothers to take their invention back to Ohio and fly on the hard, less windy ground there.
This greatly amused Dayton’s residents. Slowly, the brothers built an audience, practicing their flights outside Dayton. As they did so, their flights got longer. Slowly, the brothers extended their flying time and added a passenger seat to take special guests on, quite literally, the ride of their lives.
Victory Lap
By 1905, with the development of the Wright Flyer III, the brothers had become known for their efforts. As HG Wells had noted, the warfare applications were instantly apparent to everyone. Slowly, the US government began to take an interest in flight. And, so did foreign governments. France became increasingly interested, bringing the brothers to France for several months to showcase their invention and negotiate the sale of a prototype to the French government.
In France, the awkward Midwestern brothers achieved a level of celebrity they found unimaginable. Women flocked to them, and their talks sparked huge crowds. Most surprisingly, at least to them, France paid them over $200,000 for their prototype, making the family wealthy for the first time. Katherine even came to visit them, enjoying the Parisian life in her first significant trip from Dayton.
The US military was not to be left behind, however. Shortly thereafter, the US government had commissioned the Wrights to build a military flyer for them. By 1908, they had begun test runs. And, on September 17th, 1908, Teddy Roosevelt himself was set to ride with Orville (who was the typical test pilot). But, at the last minute, Roosevelt cancelled, placing the young Lt. Thomas Selfridge in place instead. Unfortunately, the plane malfunctioned, leading it to dive headfirst into the earth, killing Selfridge and badly injuring Orville. Had Roosevelt gotten in the plane, he, instead of Selfridge, would have been the world’s first airplane fatality.6
Though it appeared that the crash would take Orville’s life, Katherine nursed him back to health for months, enabling him to make a nearly complete recovery (he would walk with a cane ever after). Far from diminishing their status as inventors, this only increased admiration for the brothers. Not only were they seen as brilliant inventors, but also as fearless risk-takers, willing to bet their lives on their ideas.
The two continued to evangelize airplane development until 1912, when Wilbur became ill and died at the age of 45. Katherine and Orville would continue on together until 1926, when she married a former college classmate. Orville was furious, feeling that he’d been betrayed. He refused to speak with her or attend the wedding, reconnecting only on her deathbed in 1929. Orville himself would live on to age 76, dying from a heart attack in 1948, having seen his dreams come to fruition as commercial flight became a part of society.
Sticking the landing
It’s hard to fathom the changes the Wrights saw in their lifetime. As Smil notes, between the time the Wright family settled in Dayton and when the brothers tested their prototype,
Amidst this blizzard of change, the Wrights added the proverbial cherry on top, enabling humankind to soar with the birds for the first time. And, while some innovations in language have remained for generations without any practical application, in their lifetime, the Wrights could see their invention remake warfare and travel.
Incredibly, only six years passed from the brothers’ first flight in Kitty Hawk in 1903 to the first military plane in 1909. By 1914, the first commercial airline flights were taking place in Florida, though it wasn’t until the 1920s that they became commonplace.
Beyond the material benefits of their innovation, an observer today cannot help but notice the very different intellectual environment in which the Wrights operated. While today we associate science with the credentialed, back then, it was the “artisan inventors” who dominated the landscape.7 Far from being created in a lab, the Wright brothers' invention was built on the godforsaken shores of North Carolina by two men without a high school diploma. And, though they reached out to ‘experts,’ the experts were relatively unhelpful. They even supplied their own funding, developing inventions in domains ranging from materials (e.g., for the wings) to motors (e.g., for the propellers). In so doing, they became leaders in a wide variety of fields to an extent unimaginable today. Remarkably, their total investment was some $1,000, mostly spent on materials.
Given all the talk about artificial intelligence today, it’s hard not to see parallels to AI. One of the reasons software, and now artificial intelligence, have moved so quickly was that, relative to hardware, initial funding requirements were low and the uncredentialed could easily test and try innovations. As Waymo has found, attempting to do something similar with cars (self-driving cars, in Waymo’s case) requires significantly more funding and bureaucratic maneuvering.
In that sense, the Wrights are emblematic of our conception of inventors. They single-mindedly bent the course of human history by pursuing their passion for flight. And, they did so despite the naysaying of the ‘experts’ around them. In doing so, they pushed the already innovative ‘Age of Synergy’ further, conquering nature to take man to new heights.
I use this source throughout: McCullough, David. The Wright Brothers. Simon and Schuster, 2015.
See Gordon, Robert. The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living Since the Civil War. Princeton University Press, 2017.
Smil, Vaclav. Creating and Transforming the Twentieth Century, Revised and Expanded: Technical Innovations and Their Lasting Impact. Oxford University Press, 2025.
Smil, Twentieth Century
McCullough, Wright Brothers, pg 59. Note that this was actually from their 1901 trip. Their first trip appears to have been difficult, but not as difficult as the subsequent ones.
“1909 Wright Military Flyer.” 1909 Wright Military Flyer | National Air and Space Museum. Accessed June 2, 2025. https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/1909-wright-military-flyer/nasm_A19120001000.
Mokyr, Joel. The Gifts of Athena. Princeton University Press, 2011.