The Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville, are often depicted as lone geniuses, secretly assembling the first successful powered aircraft far from civilization at Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. There is a germ of truth in the popular story, but only a germ. The brothers succeeded while so many other experimenters failed not because they possessed superhuman intelligence, but rather because they approached the problem of powered flight as engineers, using a step-by-step methodology to tackle the many different challenges while at the same time carefully measuring and logging each test case. Still, this wasn’t enough, and the brothers resorted to fundamental research in achieving their final breakthrough. Their approach to success remains a model of scientific research and applied technology, and is applicable today in the physics laboratory.

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