Wright Brothers Quotes

I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years.

Among all the marvels of modern invention, that with which I am most concerned is, of course, air transportation. Flying is perhaps the most dramatic of recent scientific attainment. In the brief span of thirty-odd years, the world has seen an inventor's dream first materialized by the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk become an everyday actuality.

Tell him solitude is creative if he is strong and the final decisions are made in silent rooms. Tell him to be different from other people if it comes natural and easy being different. Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives. Let him seek deep for where he is a born natural. Then he may understand Shakespeare and the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov, Michael Faraday and free imaginations Bringing changes into a world resenting change. He will be lonely enough to have time for the work he knows as his own.

This book is dedicated to Wilbur and Orville Wright, without whom air sickness would still be just a dream.

Something I'll always remember - when I was a kid, I shook hands with Orville Wright. Forty years later, I shook hands with Neil Armstrong. The guy that invented the airplane and the guy that walked on the moon. In a lifetime, that's kinda wild when you think about it.

When counting on learning from innovation, there are great successes but also failures. The Wright Brothers invented the aircraft and started an amazing process of innovation, where we now have planes that carry 500 passengers. Along the way there were some silly looking vehicles that crashed early on.

There was a wonderful little short four-year time period when marvelous things happened. It started in 1908, when the Wright brothers flew in Paris, and everybody said, 'Ooh, hey, I can do that.' There's only a few people that have flown in early 1908. In four years, 39 countries had hundreds of airplanes, thousands of pilots.

If the Wright Brothers were alive today, Orville would have to lay off Wilbur.

The danger in regulating AI too early is comparable to defining airline regulations in the early 1900’s at the time of the Wright Brothers earliest flights: all flights must be limited to 400 yards (since no plane can safely fly further), no faster than 45 mph (faster puts the pilot at too much risk), no higher than 15′ (pilots can survive a 15′ fall but not a 50′ fall), shall be in a straight line (planes are too unstable in turns), requires a catapult launch into the wind and a wind speed of no less than 15 knots (for the safety of the pilot and bystanders), and no more than one passenger is allowed (since no engine or airframe can safely support more). Any one of these then “common-sense” rules would have severely impacted the evolution of the airline industry. Jurisdictions not subject to such rules would become the industry leaders. No one has the prescience necessary to successfully regulate an early-stage technology.

The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.

I believe the new machine of the Wrights to be the most promising attempt at flight that has yet been made.

The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.

I think progress began to retrogress when Wilbur and Orville started tinkering around in Dayton and at Kitty Hawk, because I believe that two Wrights made a wrong.

We left Dayton, September 23, and arrived at our camp at Kill Devil Hill on Friday, the 25th.

There was a flight from Cleveland to New York City with just two people on board. There hasn't been two people on an airplane since the Wright brothers.

If the Wright brothers hadn't put their lives on the line, we would not be flying around the world these days. So we need pioneers.

As a boy, because I was born and raised in Ohio, about 60 miles north of Dayton, the legends of the Wrights have been in my memories as long as I can remember.

There's a historical milestone in the fact that our Apollo 11 landing on the moon took place a mere 66 years after the Wright Brothers' first flight.

In 1903 the Wright brothers invented airplanes, because in 1902 they took a road trip across the country with their family.

In Missouri, we built the steamships that plied the Mississippi. It was people of Missouri who believed that a human being could fly across the Atlantic Ocean alone. And it was Missourians who built the capsule in which an American first orbited the earth.

I relate more to the descendants of Galileo Galilei and the Wright brothers than I do to anyone else you might mention. If you could name someone working today who I could relate to, I'd be both surprised and thrilled.

The chilly December day! two shivering bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio first felt their homemade contraption whittled out of hickory sticks, gummed together with Arnstein's bicycle cement, stretched with muslin they'd sewn on their sister's sewing machine in their own backyard on Hawthorn Street in Dayton, Ohio, soar into the air above the dunes and the wide beach at Kitty Hawk.

Greek myths are heroic, noble and tragic; but the American Dream is heroic, comical, and uplifting. Americans are a people in whom overweening ambition is rewarded, not punished. The Wright Brothers did not have their wings melt when they flew too high. Perhaps their wings were more soundly built than those of Icarus.