1903 Wright Flyer - The First Airplane
A stop on Washington DC National Mall Walking Tour, a free self-guided tour.
Photo: Vintage Fan 5678, CC BY 4.0 (cropped)In The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Aerial Age, gallery 107 on the west side of the first floor, hangs the original 1903 Wright Flyer. On December 17, 1903, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright made four flights in it. The longest, with Wilbur at the controls, covered 852 feet in 59 seconds.
The Flyer almost did not come here. The Smithsonian long credited its own former secretary, Samuel Langley, with building the first plane capable of flight, and in protest Orville sent the Flyer to the Science Museum in London in 1928. Only after the Smithsonian publicly corrected the record did it come home, in 1948, after Orville's death.
The gallery also covers the bicycle business in Dayton, Ohio, that paid for their experiments.
Next, find the Pioneers of Flight gallery and the Spirit of St. Louis.
More on Wikipedia: Wright Flyer · Wright brothers · Samuel Langley
Stops on this tour
- Washington Monument
- National Museum of African American History and Cu
- National Museum of American History
- Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
- National Gallery of Art
- United States Capitol
- United States Botanic Garden
- National Museum of the American Indian
- National Air and Space Museum
- Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
- The Smithsonian Institution Building - The Castle
- Freer Gallery of Art
- Jefferson Memorial
- World War II Memorial
- Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial
- Korean War Memorial
- Lincoln Memorial
- Vietnam Veterans Memorial
- White House Ellipse
- White House
- Lafayette Square