It might be heresy to some, but Orville and Wilbur Wright did not invent flying in 1903. For centuries others had dabbled with lighter-than-air balloons, and later airplane prototypes were built and tested by an intrepid lot (there’s also the matter of those things called birds). Rather, what the bicycle-maker brothers from Dayton, Ohio invented was a way to control powered flight allowing their planes—and virtually all that followed in the remarkable aviation industry they launched—to take off, change direction, altitude, and then land safely again. Their breakthrough invention in three-axis control not…
