The Wright brothers used a homemade wind tunnel to reinvent the shape of wings
The Wright brothers achieved the first powered flight only after building a custom wind tunnel to prove that existing scientific data on wing lift was fundamentally incorrect.
Before they ever left the ground at Kitty Hawk, Wilbur and Orville Wright became the world's first true aeronautical engineers by identifying a catastrophic error in the lift tables provided by previous pioneers like Otto Lilienthal. In 1902, they built a 1.8-meter-long wind tunnel powered by a one-cylinder gas engine and tested over 200 different wing shapes. They discovered that a 1:20 camber-to-chord ratio—the curve of the wing—provided three times more lift than the flat surfaces many others were using.
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