How do you lift a person and steer?

That time, that place

Around 1900 most attempts at flight treated it as a problem of power: bigger engines, bigger wings. Lilienthal made over two thousand glides and died when one went out of control.

Why this question

Two brothers who ran a bicycle shop saw it differently. A bicycle falls over if you leave it alone; a rider keeps balancing it. Perhaps an aircraft should not be built stable but built controllable.

Turning was the hard part. Watching birds twist their wingtips, they thought of warping the whole wing so the two sides carry different lift.

What was found

Their most important work was not the flight but what came before it. Distrusting the published lift tables, they built a wind tunnel, tested some two hundred wing shapes, and rewrote the numbers themselves.

On 17 December 1903 at Kitty Hawk they flew thirty-six metres in twelve seconds. Five people were watching.

An aircraft must be controlled about three axes: pitch, yaw and roll. Handling all three at once is what they did first.