In 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright conducted tests at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, that are often heralded as the dawn of heavier-than-air flight. The brothers lived and worked in Dayton, Ohio, however, and it was there that they achieved their ultimate goal. In 1905, in a field on the outskirts of Dayton, they created a practical flying machine.
In a 1906 statement to the Aero Club of America, they described how at Kitty Hawk, their “man-carrying motor flyer…sustained itself in the air for 59 seconds,” flying just 852 feet. This wasn’t enough for the inventors. “From the beginning,” they wrote, “the prime object was to devise a machine of practical utility, rather than a useless and extravagant toy.”
Back in Dayton, they flew over one hundred test flights with a second prototype in 1904. Then, in 1905, they began testing the Wright Flyer III. “The experiments were made in a swampy meadow about 8 miles east of Dayton, Ohio,” they wrote. The meadow belonged to their banker, Torrence Huffman, and allowed the brothers to avoid expensive jaunts to North Carolina.
By September 1905, the Wrights reported, “almost every flight established a new record.” A table in their statement showed the distance, duration, and reason for ending the flights. Early flights used a partially filled field tank and often ended due to hot bearings. But on October 5th, they filled the fuel tank completely. The flyer circled the meadow for thirty-eight minutes and three seconds. The reason for ending the flight: “Exhaustion of fuel.”
“The flight of October 5th was longer than the 105 flights of the year 1904 together,” they wrote. They didn’t describe the improvements that made this possible in detail, however. This tendency toward secrecy caused problems for the brothers, argues Daniel Schlenoff.
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“They refused to demonstrate its flight capabilities without a signed sales contract,” Schlenoff explains. Skeptical articles appeared in Scientific American as rivals took to the stage. Schlenoff writes that in November 1906, “Brazilian-born Alberto Santos-Dumont made the first public demonstration of flight,” cementing himself in aviation history.
Nearing a deal with the US Army, the Wrights flew a public demonstration in 1908. But the industry was advancing rapidly. After Wilbur died in 1912, Schlenoff writes, “Orville was left floundering against the rising tide of competition and fighting protracted patent-infringement lawsuits.”
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David Nolin and Dane Mutter explain that Huffman Prairie evolved along with aviation. It became a flight school during World War I, and over the decades, the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base grew up around it. In the 1980s, Nolin and Mutter helped coordinate the restoration of a natural prairie ecosystem at the site.
“It’s fascinating to consider,” they reflect, that the Wright brothers “contributed inadvertently to the preservation of a piece of the prairie.”
Today, Huffman Prairie and the Wright Flyer III are National Historic Landmarks. Visitors can walk through wildflowers as military aircraft fly over a lonely barn-like hangar—a replica of one that housed the first practical flying machine.
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