Wilbur Wright

Wilbur Wright died in Dayton, Ohio, on May 30, 1912, of typhoid fever. He was forty-five. Born near Millville, Indiana, on April 16, 1867, and raised in Dayton, he and his brother Orville ran a bicycle shop that became the workshop for a flying machine. At Kitty Hawk in 1903 they proved a controlled, powered airplane. Wilbur then demonstrated the machine in France and the United States with a calm that looked like shyness and was closer to precision. He did not live to see the industry that followed. Dayton kept the house, the shop, and the cemetery. The field west of town still carries the family name.