Today in Technology History
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January 30
On this day in 1948, Orville Wright died at the age of 76.
Orville Wright, with his older brother Wilbur, invented the airplane. It was Orville who made the first airplane flight in 1903.
After Wilbur's death of typhoid fever in 1912, Orville continued the fight to protect their patent rights. In 1915, Orville sold his interest in the Wright Company he had helped found, but he continued to quietly promote aeronautics for the rest of his life.
Consider what Orville Wright lived through. Not only did he invent the airplane and earn lasting acclaim, but his long life allowed him something that many other inventors never got: the chance to see many of his invention's practical uses - like passenger airlines (1914) and crop dusting (late 1910s). He lived through the early days of barnstorming and parachuting, and he was alive for Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic (1927). And of course he lived to see both the dogfights of the first world war and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the conclusion of the second.
Related links:
Click here for an Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Orville Wright's later years.
Click here for a site is packed with pictures of and stories about the Wrights and their planes.
Click here for several original articles written by Orville and Wilbur Wright.
Click here for the Air and Space Museum's official homepage for the Wright brothers' 1903 plane.
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