Flight

Airfoil Collection

On any day, at any airport, in any city, people fly. Many people experience their "first" flight as a child or young adult. For some people, flying has become routine.

Stop for a moment and consider the wonder. How can an aircraft, loaded with people and cargo, possibly fly?

Wind Tunnel

If you like to fly, you owe some thanks to Wilbur and Orville Wright, two hobbyists who became scientists and then achieved first flight. Believe it or not, the Wright brothers credited their success to the investigations that they did in their workshop in Dayton, Ohio, rather than all of their test glides.

Wright Notebooks

If you could travel back in time to the autumn of 1901, you would find Wilbur and Orville Wright locked inside of their workshop in Dayton, Ohio, gathering scientific data about the forces of flight. For months, they repeated test after test, filling notebooks with their results.

Those notebooks are preserved in The Franklin Institute's collection of artifacts. The collection also includes numerous scraps of paper that they used to chart their data. Most fascinating are the pieces of wallpaper with numbers and vectors scribbled on the backside. Notice the date: September 1901.