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little music?
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If you're looking for help with a paper on the Wright brothers, or you're involved in a History Day project, we've collected some information that you may find useful.

PRIMARY SOURCES

When writing an report on an historical event, your most reliable sources are eyewitness accounts from people who actually saw or participated in the event. These are called primary sources. The best primary sources for the invention of the airplane are the Wright brothers themselves, who -- fortunately for us -- left behind reams of letters, diaries, photographs, technical papers, and other first-person accounts of their experiments. We also have a good many reports from relatives, friends, neighbors, employees, and associates who knew them well and were part of their lives.

Where you dive in to the first-person accounts and how deeply you dive depends on what you already know about the Wright brothers, your level of interest, and/or just how determined your are to get a good grade on your report. We've listed the primary sources here in the suggested order in which you should read them if you're starting with nothing more than what you've gleaned from general history books.

1. Wright, Orville, How We Invented the Airplane: An Illustrated History, edited by Fred C. Kelly, New York, Dover Publications, 1988.

This is a short book (88 pages), lavishly illustrated with lots of photos. (Bottom line -- it's a great primary source that won't take you long to read.) It's a collection of several magazine articles written by Orville Wright in which he tells the story of the invention of the airplane in his own words. The articles are strung together with commentary by Fred C. Kelly, a friend of Orville's and the official biographer of the Wright Brothers, to help you understand the whole story.

2. Kelly, Fred C., The Wright Brothers: A Biography, New York, Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1943. Republished by Dover Publications in 1989.

Although Fred Kelly is listed as the author of this book, this is really an "as told to" biography -- the story of the Wright brothers as told to Fred Kelly by Orville Wright. Kelly worked closely with Orville to create an "authorized" account of the invention of the airplane. Orville told Kelly the particulars of the story, then edited the final manuscript, so we have his assurance that Kelly's telling of the tale is as accurate as his own. In that sense, this can be considered a primary resource. It's a medium-size book (340 pages) and provides a full, detailed account of the lives of the Wright brothers.

3. Wright, Orville and Wilbur, Miracle at Kitty Hawk: The Letters of Wilbur and Orville Wright, edited by Fred C. Kelly, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1951. Republished by Dover Publications in 1996.

Now you're getting to the heart of the matter. This large book (482 pages) contains extracts from the letters and diaries of the Wright brothers. Kelly has strung them together in such a way as to create a first-person account of the invention of the airplane and the lives of the Wright brothers in detail. You learn what the brothers were thinking and why they did what they did at every turn of the story.

4. Miller, Ivonette Wright, Wright Reminiscences, Dayton, Ohio, The Air Force Museum Foundation, 1978.

This will help fill in the story with first-hand accounts from people who knew the Wright brothers intimately. Ivonette Wright Miller was Lorin Wright's daughter and a niece of Wilbur and Orville Wright. She was at their home often to visit her uncles, her aunt (Katherine Wright), and her grandfather (Bishop Milton Wright). Along with the other relatives and friends whose reminiscences she has collected, Ms. Miller paints an intimate picture of life in the Wright household.

IN DEPTH RESEARCH

If you really get hooked on the story (many people do) and you're hungry for the minute details of the Wright adventure, there are two more primary sources that you can consult:

5. Wright, Orville and Wilbur, The Papers of Wilbur & Orville Wright, Volumes 1 and 2, edited by Marvin W. McFarland. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953.

This is a greatly expanded collection of letters and papers, much like Kelly's Miracle at Kitty Hawk, but with three times the information. (Together, volumes 1 and 2 contain 1278 pages.) This is a must if you're after the engineering side of the story -- Orville and Wilbur's most important technical papers are included here.

6. Jakab, Peter L. and Young, Rick, The Published Writings of Wilbur and Orville Wright, Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.

You could consider this a companion book to McFarland's volumes (above). This contains most of the magazine articles,  interviews, technical papers, and other writings that the Wright brothers published in contemporary newspapers, magazines, and journals.

For additional books, pamphlets, and videos on the Wright brothers, see our bibliography at Books, Movies, &tc.

INTERLIBRARY LOAN

If you're library doesn't have one of the primary sources we've mentioned here, don't panic.  You should be able to get them through "interlibrary loan." This is a service that most large libraries offer. If you need a book that's not on the shelves in your local library, ask the librarian for an interlibrary loan form. Fill it out with the information on this page and then submit it to the librarian. They will do a computer search to find the closest library with the book available for loan and order it for you. When it comes in, they will notify you. Then you can borrow the book, usually for the same amount of time as the other books in your local library.

Wright Photos

Many of you have written in asking where you can get copies of Wright photos to make History Day displays or help illustrate your reports. How about right here? For free! The catch is that you have to download them and print them out your self.

We've put up a page of twelve photos that tell the story of the invention of the airplane from 1899 when the Wright brothers conducted their first aeronautical experiment to 1909 when they finally began selling practical airplanes. Choose the photos you want and download the high-resolution images by following the instructions at the top of the page. Once you have downloaded the high-res files, you can print out large, detailed images on an ordinary inkjet or laser printer. For best results, print these out on glossy "photo" paper made especially for computer printers. This paper is available at most office supply and computer stores. Teachers: You can use these hi-res images as digital slides in classroom presentations.

If you want to include these photos in reports, you will probably want to resize them so the files aren't quite so big. Otherwise the report file will be massive and your computer may have a hard time digesting it when you print it out. Resize the photos to a 640 x 400 screen -- this should reduce most of them to a file size of between 50K and 100K.

We have two pages of photos, 12 photos per page. To get to the first photo download page, click HERE.

Wright Timeline

Sometimes a timeline gives you a succinct overview of an historical event and shows how it developed. To help understand the invention of the airplane, here's a brief chronology of the Wright brothers lives. If you'd like a more detailed timeline that puts the Wright story in its perspective with other important events, click HERE.

WRIGHT AIRPLANE MODELS -- REAL & VIRTUAL

If you would like to build a model of a Wright airplane to spice up your report or your History Day project, we've put together a list of the various models  in our page of Model Kits. We've found several wooden, plastic, and paper models to choose from. If you know about a model kit that we haven't listed, please let us know so we can share it with other visitors to the museum.

If you aren't the hands-on sort that enjoys building models, maybe you'd like a virtual model for your report or project. We've found a nice VRML (Virtual Reality Mark-up Language) model of the Wright Flyer 1 that you can download and view with any virtual reality viewer.  

It's a big file -- over 600K -- so it may take a while depending on the speed of your modem. After you save the file, you'll have to unzip it with WinZip.

If you need a virtual reality viewer, you can download the Cosmo Player free from Cosmo Software (http://www.cai.com/cosmo/). It's got a nice console that allows you to zoom, pan, slide, and turn around the Flyer so you can see it from all sides and angles. It's thoroughly geeky -- your teacher should be suitably impressed. 

Wright AIRPLANE Drawings

If you want to build you're own model, you'll need a set of plans. For detailed plans, see the Plans & Blueprints page. We've listed several sources from which you can buy engineering drawings of the 1903 Wright Flyer 1.

Web Site Author

If you need to cite this web site as one of your research sources, you can assume that unless otherwise noted, the author of the pages on this site is Nick Engler. The pages were published between 1998 and 2001.

Back to the top

Like all good scholars, we don't pretend to have all the answers, and we're constantly searching for new information or ways to make our exhibits better and more accurate. We also welcome Wright scholars and enthusiasts who would like to participate. If you have information that we should include, or want to add to what's already here, please write. Address your comments to mailto:[email protected].
Last updated: February 19, 2001.