What are the Wright brothers famous for?

The first controlled, powered, sustained flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft, on 17 December 1903 - four flights that day, the longest 260 metres in 59 seconds. Every word of the qualifier is contested by someone, which is why it is loaded with them: gliders had flown, powered hops had been made, but nobody had combined power with the ability to steer and to repeat it.

Control was their actual contribution, and it is the part that gets forgotten in favour of the engine. Others were building powerful engines and hoping for inherent stability; the Wrights, who were bicycle makers, assumed an aircraft would be unstable and needed to be flown - and worked out three-axis control, warping the wings to roll. Every aircraft since uses the same principle. They also built their own wind tunnel after finding the published lift tables were wrong, and tested some two hundred wing shapes.

They then spent a decade litigating. The Wright patent covered the control system so broadly that it held back American aviation for years, and the resulting patent war with Glenn Curtiss consumed Wilbur's last years - he died of typhoid at 45, and his father wrote that too much worry had shortened his life. By the First World War the United States was buying French aircraft, having invented the thing eleven years earlier.