Orville Wright Quotes

137 Orville Wright Quotes and (Bonus 30 Wilbur Wright Quotes)
– The Wright Brothers

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Learning the secret of flight from a bird was a good deal like learning the secret of magic from a magician. After you once know the trick and know what to look for you see things that you did not notice when you did not know exactly what to look for.
Orville Wright

If my father had not been the kind who encouraged his children to pursue intellectual interests without any thought of profit, our early curiosity about flying would have been nipped too early to bear fruit.
Orville Wright

We wrote to a number of the best known automobile manufacturers in an endeavour to secure a motor for the new machine. Not receiving favourable answers from any of these we proceeded to design a motor of our own…
Orville Wright

Things which seemed reasonable were often found to be untrue, and things which seemed unreasonable were sometimes true.
Orville Wright

We had taken up aeronautics merely as a sport. We reluctantly entered upon the scientific side of it. But we soon found the work so fascinating that we were drawn into it deeper and deeper.
Orville Wright

The motor close beside you kept up an almost deafening roar during the whole flight, yet in your excitement you did not notice it till it stopped!
Orville Wright

The public was led to believe that flying was as impossible as perpetual motion.
Orville Wright

[It] was the first time in the history of the world that a machine carrying a man and driven by a motor had lifted itself from the ground in free flight.
Orville Wright

Wilbur came to my assistance and held down my coat while I tried to drive the nails. But the wind was so strong I could not guide the hammer and succeeded in striking my fingers as often as the nails.
Orville Wright

Although we intently watched birds fly in a hope of learning something from them, I cannot think of anything that was first learned in that way.
Orville Wright



If birds can glide for long periods of time, then… why can’t I?
Orville Wright

[On revising the 1939 label on a reproduction of their original wind tunnel] In their [The Wright Bros] scientific approach to the problem of flight they devised, in 1901, the first wind tunnel and balances giving results sufficiently accurate to be of use in designing aircraft.
Orville Wright

[As a 9 year old boy his earliest surviving written message – on a postcard to Bishop Wright his father] The other day I took a machine can and filled it with water then I put it on the stove, I waited a little while and the water came squirting out of the top about a foot.
Orville Wright

(Bishop Wright their father) All the money anyone needs, is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others.
Orville Wright

I got interested in some woodcuts I saw in the old Century magazine, and I tried to make some tools for carving wood blocks. I made my first tool out of the spring of a pocket-knife, and Will fashioned a wooden handle for it. Then we rigged up a crude press, mostly of wood. Finally we got a few fonts of brevier type. It was no fun having a press and type without printing something and finally we began to get out our little neighborhood paper.
Orville Wright

[On the French toy helicopter given to them by their father in 1878] My brother Wilbur made many copies of it, immediately after the original was broken. The first machine that I remember helping take part to build was in 1881.
Orville Wright

At the time when we read these works [on other people’s failures in flying] in 1899 and 1900 I do not believe that we altogether understood the cause and failure of many of them. Later we found that it was due to an almost entire lack of knowledge of both the principles of equilibrium and the science of aerodynamics.
Orville Wright

When the machine was flown as a Kite, the wing with the greater angle always had the greater lift, because the kite cords or cables prevented one wing from attaining a higher speed through the air than the other.
Orville Wright

The rate of vertical descent of a parachute is determined by the weight carried per square foot of sustaining surface. The rate of descent of a glider is partly determined by the weight carried per square foot of sustaining surface and partly by the angle of incidence at which the surfaces are exposed. The rate of vertical descent in a gliding flight would be slower than that of a parachute at the larger angles of incidence and faster with small angles of incidence.
Orville Wright

[On the pilot seat changing from the original one of lying down on ones stomach with head at the front] The position had some advantages, in that one was not easily thrown out of the machine, when the machine stopped suddenly on the ground. We abandoned it, however, on account of its tiring the neck of the operator in looking forward ahead of the machine.
Orville Wright



The wing warping and the rudder were mechanically coupled in order to relieve the operator of thinking of two operations simultaneously.
Orville Wright

Though the subject of aerial navigation is generally considered new, it has occupied the minds of men more or less from the earliest ages. Our personal interest in it dates from our childhood days. Late in the autumn of 1878 our father came into the house one evening with some object partly concealed in his hands, and before we could see what it was, he tossed it into the air. Instead of falling to the floor, as we expected, it flew across the room, till it struck the ceiling, where it fluttered awhile, and finally sank to the floor. It was a little toy, known to scientists as a “helicoptere,” but which we, with sublime disregard for science, at once dubbed a “bat.” It was a light frame of cork and bamboo, covered with paper, which formed two screws, driven in opposite directions by rubber bands under torsion. A toy so delicate lasted only a short time in the hands of small boys, but its memory was abiding.
Orville Wright

We began building these helicopteres for ourselves, making each one larger than that preceding. But, to our astonishment, we found that the larger the “bat” the less it flew. We did not know that a machine having only twice the linear dimensions of another would require eight times the power. We finally became discouraged, and returned to kite-flying, a sport to which we had devoted so much attention that we were regarded as experts. But as we became older we had to give up this fascinating sport as unbecoming to boys of our ages.
Orville Wright

It was not till the news of the sad death of Lilienthal reached America in the summer of 1896 that we again gave more than passing attention to the subject of flying.
Orville Wright

Larger works [From the Smithsonian Institute] gave us a good understanding of the nature of the flying problem, and the difficulties in past attempts to solve it
Orville Wright

Mouillard and Lilienthal, the great missionaries of the flying cause, infected us with their own unquenchable enthusiasm, and transformed idle curiosity into the active zeal of workers.
Orville Wright

Our sympathies were with the latter school [On soaring flight rather than powered flight], partly from impatience at the wasteful extravagance of mounting delicate and costly machinery on wings which no one knew how to manage, and partly, no doubt, from the extraordinary charm and enthusiasm with which the apostles of soaring flight set forth the beauties of sailing through the air on fixed wings, deriving the motive power from the wind itself.
Orville Wright

The balancing of a flyer may seem, at first thought, to be a very simple matter, yet almost every experimenter had found in this one point which he could not satisfactorily master.
Orville Wright

After considering the practical effect of the dihedral principle, we reached the conclusion that a flyer founded upon it might be of interest from a scientific point of view, but could be of no value in a practical way. We therefore resolved to try a fundamentally different principle. We would arrange the machine so that it would not tend to right itself.
Orville Wright

Lilienthal and Chanute had guided and balanced their machines, by shifting the weight of the operator’s body. But this method seemed to us incapable of expansion to meet large conditions, because the weight to be moved and the distance of possible motion were limited, while the disturbing forces steadily increased, both with wing area and with wind velocity. In order to meet the needs of large machines, we wished to employ some system whereby the operator could vary at will the inclination of different parts of the wings, and thus obtain from the wind forces to restore the balance which the wind itself had disturbed. This could easily be done by using wings capable of being warped, and by supplementary adjustable surfaces in the shape of rudders.
Orville Wright



The period from 1885 to 1900 was one of unexampled activity in aeronautics, and for a time there was high hope that the age of flying was at hand. But Maxim, after spending $100,000, abandoned[3] the work; the Ader machine, built at the expense of the French Government, was a failure; Lilienthal and Pilcher were killed in experiments; and Chanute and many others, from one cause or another, had relaxed their efforts, though it subsequently became known that Professor Langley was still secretly at work on a machine for the United States Government.
Orville Wright

The public, discouraged by the failures and tragedies just witnessed, considered flight beyond the reach of man, and classed its adherents with the inventors of perpetual motion. We began our active experiments at the close of this period…
Orville Wright

Our machine was designed to be flown as a kite, with a man on board, in winds from 15 to 20 miles an hour. But, upon trial, it was found that much stronger winds were required to lift it. Suitable winds not being plentiful, we found it necessary, in order to test the new balancing system, to fly the machine as a kite without a man on board, operating the levers through cords from the ground. This did not give the practice anticipated, but it inspired confidence in the new system of balance.
Orville Wright

Upon trial, however, the lifting capacity again fell very far short of calculation, so that the idea of securing practice while flying as a kite had to be abandoned. Mr. Chanute, who witnessed the experiments, told us that the trouble was not due to poor construction of the machine. We saw only one other explanation—that the tables of air-pressures in general use were incorrect.
Orville Wright

The experiments of 1901 were far from encouraging. Although Mr. Chanute assured us that, both in control and in weight carried per horse-power, the results obtained were better than those of any of our predecessors, yet we saw that the calculations upon which all flying machines had been based were unreliable, and that all were simply groping in the dark. Having set out with absolute faith in the existing scientific data, we were driven to doubt one thing after another, till finally, after two years of experiment, we cast it all aside, and decided to rely entirely upon our own investigations.
Orville Wright

Truth and error were everywhere so intimately mixed as to be undistinguishable. Nevertheless, the time expended in preliminary study of books was not misspent, for they gave us a good general understanding of the subject, and enabled us at the outset to avoid effort in many directions in which results would have been hopeless.
Orville Wright

The standard measurements of wind-pressures is the force produced by a current of air of one mile per hour velocity striking square against a plane of one square foot area. The practical difficulties of obtaining an exact measurement of this force have been great. The measurements by different recognized authorities vary 50 per cent.
Orville Wright

When this simplest of measurements presents so great difficulties, what shall be said of the troubles encountered by those who attempt to find the pressure at each angle as the plane is inclined more and more edgewise to the wind?
Orville Wright

Yet a critical examination of the data upon which he [Professor Langley] based his conclusions as to the pressures at small angles shows results so various as to make many of his conclusions little better than guesswork.
Orville Wright

To work intelligently, one needs to know the effects of a multitude of variations that could be incorporated in the surfaces of flying machines. The pressures on squares are different from those on rectangles, circles, triangles, or ellipses; arched surfaces differ from planes, and vary among themselves according to the depth of curvature; true arcs differ from parabolas, and the latter differ among themselves; thick surfaces differ from thin, and surfaces thicker in one place than another vary in pressure when the positions of maximum thickness are different; some surfaces are most efficient at one angle, others at other angles. The shape of the edge also makes a difference, so that thousands of combinations are possible in so simple a thing as a wing.
Orville Wright



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