All of us who benefit from airline travel owe the Wright brothers a debt of gratitude as the aviation pioneers credited with inventing and building the world’s first successful powered airplane and making the first sustained flight on December 17, 1903.
In his book The Wright Brothers, David McCullough writes that many of the “most prominent engineers, scientists, and original thinkers of the nineteenth century had been working on the problem of controlled flight,” without success.
Orville Wright is quoted as saying, “The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air.”
Forbes magazine recently published an article summarizing McCullough’s book by sharing “Six Lessons on Innovations From the Wright Brothers.”
Lesson one is how they kept going despite their failures. Additionally, they taught us how to take risks and still avoid total disaster. Most importantly however, the Wright brothers taught us to test, iterate, and continue to test prototypes, until you build something of value that the world needs–even if the world doesn’t recognize it yet.
To read Forbes’ article and learn more from the Wright brothers, click here.
Hi Mike Cameron! This article is really good. The points you discussed about Wright Brothers innovation is really appreciable.