NASM Press Kit - The Wright Brothers & The Invention of the Aerial Age

• Growing up, the Wright brothers had private nicknames for each other. Wilbur (1867-1912) was known as “Ullam,” short for Jullam, which is German for William. Orville (1871-1948) was known as “Bubbo” or “Bubs,” Wilbur’s pronunciation of “brother” when Orville was a baby.

• The premiere patent for all airplanes was filed by the Wright brothers on March 23, 1903, several months before the first powered flight. The patent, based largely on the control features of the 1902 Wright glider, was granted May 22, 1906.

• The lift balance displayed in the exhibition, along with the other crucial wind tunnel testing instruments used by the Wrights to unlock the secrets of aerodynamics, were lost for decades. They were found by Orville in 1946 inside an old typewriter case he was about to throw out.

• John T. Daniels (1884-1948), the North Carolina man who took the famous photograph of the first powered flight on Dec. 17, 1903, was almost killed a few hours later when, after the fourth flight, wind picked up the unmanned Flyer. Daniels grabbed one of the airplane’s struts and fell inside the machine as it was tossed violently across the sand. Orville Wright wrote: “His escape was miraculous, as he was in with the engine and chains.”

• No recordings of Wilbur and Orville Wright’s voices are known to exist despite both men having lived well into the age of recorded sound.

• Orville Wright was pilot in the first airplane crash that resulted in a fatality. Killed was Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge (1882-1908), who died as a passenger at Fort Myer, Va., on Sept. 17, 1908, during an Army trial of the brothers’ new military airplane. Orville spent seven weeks in a hospital with a broken thigh, broken ribs, an injured back and head wounds.

• For several years, the Smithsonian Institution credited late Smithsonian Secretary Samuel P. Langley (1834-1906) with creating the first powered machine “capable” of flight, although Langley’s piloted Aerodrome was a failure. Out of frustration, Orville Wright sent the 1903 Flyer to the Science Museum in London for display in 1928. The Smithsonian finally acknowledged in 1942 the Wrights as the first to achieve powered flight and Orville Wright soon approved returning the Flyer to America and giving it to the Smithsonian. The airplane was delivered in November 1948, delayed by World War II. Orville Wright died less than ten months earlier.