Wilbur Wright: He and brother Orville Taught the World to Fly

As one of the famous Wright Brothers, Wilbur, along with his brother Orville, designed, built, and successfully flew the worlds first motorized airplane at Kitty Hawk on December 17 1903.
As the older of the two brothers, Wilbur was born on April 16, 1867 in Millville, Indiana. As very young boys the two brothers used to tinker and build their own simple mechanical toys. By 1888 they had built a large printing press on their own which they used to print and publish a newspaper called The West Side News. Having had success at this they then moved on to open up their own little bicycle repair shop in 1892 in order to pursue the interest that they both had in things mechanical. Their attentions soon turned to the idea of a flying machine and they began to manufacture their own tools to build one. They started by building a glider first and testing it to record data about what type of designs and shapes for wings worked best. They concluded through their research that the best way to fly a plane would be to have a "pilot" on board to control it instead of some kind of built in machine to fly it. By 1903 they had built their 750 lb. flyer and were ready for a test. First Orville and then Wilbur took turns flying the plane farther and farther with each successive flight. The response they got from the public was one of indifference. At the time no one saw the significance of the moment.
In the following years they played with the design of the flyer and kept improving it and so by 1908 Wilbur was setting new distance and altitude records while demonstrating his flyer in France. The first organization to show any real interest in the invention was the U.S. Army signal corps. They asked the Wright Brothers to produce a plane that could travel at speeds in excess of 40 mph.
While Orville lived for 45 more years after the initial flight in 1903, his brother Wilbur was less fortunate in terms of longevity. He contracted Typhoid Fever and died on May 30, 1912. This was about 6 weeks after the Titanic sank and less than 9 years after Kitty Hawk. He had just turned 45.