It is forty–eight years since the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, thirty–nine years since the death of Wilbur Wright, only three since the death of Orville Wright. The entire history of aircraft design and operation lies well within the life span of many of those in aeronautics today. The particular segment considered in preparing this lecture covers a period over half the length of the total. It starts with a series of cloth–covered biplanes not too different in appearance from the one of 1903 and ends with supersonic swept–wing jet–driven monoplanes. Fig. 1 may serve to give perspective and set things in their proper time relation.

The Wright brothers undertook to design and build, simply stated, a machine that would fly. They had to design the entire aircraft including power plant and propellers. Basic research, applied research, development—all of these they had to carry out themselves. They had little to go on by way of prior knowledge and found they could not safely accept what others had written until they had themselves verified it They had meagre financial resources and little formal engineering education.