Wilbur and Orville Wright were two brothers who ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio; neither had a university education. From 1899 onwards they treated flight as a serious engineering problem. The era was full of arguments about wing shape and engine power, but none of them addressed the real issue: control of the aircraft in the air.

Observing how birds twisted their wingtips, the Wrights developed the concept of three-axis control: roll, pitch, and yaw. Between 1900 and 1902 they made hundreds of gliding flights on the dunes of Kill Devil Hills at Kitty Hawk, built their own wind tunnel, and corrected the bad wing-data tables in the existing literature. In autumn 1903 they fitted their aircraft with a light gasoline engine and twin propellers of their own design.

On the morning of 17 December 1903, with five witnesses, they made four flights. Orville's first attempt lasted 12 seconds; on the day's final flight Wilbur stayed aloft for 59 seconds and covered 260 metres. The single photograph taken by lifesaver John T. Daniels — showing the machine seconds after lift-off — became the birth certificate of modern aviation.

The press greeted the invention with scepticism; newspapers did not take the story seriously for some time. Public demonstrations by Wilbur in France in 1908 dispelled the doubt. Within 70 years a human walked on the Moon; today some 100,000 commercial flights cross the world's skies every day. The Wrights' real contribution was not the engine but the philosophy of control — pilot inputs on modern aircraft still operate around the same three axes.