Hello Everyone,
What ever happened to the Weight Brothers? Why isn’t there a major aircraft company with the Wright name? One would think that hey would have emerged as the leader in aviation.
Following more mergers it ended up as part of Curtiss-Wright, which very important through World War II. But:“Curtiss-Wright failed to make the transition to design and production of jet aircraft, despite several attempts.”
they had the Wright Company.
Wilbur died young. Orville lived to be sort of an “elder statesman” of aviation, but wasn’t much of a businessman, had sense enough to know it, and sold the company in 1915 for enough to continue to live comfortably on. Eventually, the Wright Company was bought out by Curtiss, and Curtiss-Wright continues to exist to this day:
They did start a business building planes and training pilots. However, they planes, at that stage, were not much more than prototypes and test beds with little or no commercial or military value.
They also spent a lot of time and effort defending their patents regarding their plane, although other developments superseded their patents.
Wilbur only lived another nine years after the first flight, dying of Typhus in 1912.
Orville had no real stomach for business and soon sold his shares of the Wright company and went into semi-retirement.
The Wright company eventually focused on engines and survived for several decades as a major player in the aircraft engine industry, their engines powering a large number of U.S. bombers in WWII, (although no fighters, that I recall–maybe the F4F?)
Well, with that name they would had trouble taking off. 
As PastTense reported a lot had to do with concentrating on patents rather than manufacturing and continuing with the development, this article goes more into that:
In essence, the Wright brothers were like the Steve Wozniak of Apple, the one that designed the Apple computer, but the Wrights did not have a Steve Jobs to drive the business.
So they lost the confidence of investors and then the US government did not finance the airplane industry like it was happening in Europe, it also did not help that only too late the Wrights dropped the idea that the airplane was going to be used mostly for sports and not for war.
As others noted, they did stick around but couldn’t make it in the newly formed aircraft business world by themselves. However, even though they are very famous today, they are still some of the least appreciated scientist/inventors of all time. There are still claims floating around that they weren’t the ones to make the first stable, powered flight. That hardly matters even if it was even proven to be technically true. They were very methodical and were virtually guaranteed success given the way that they approached the problem of flight. They made major innovations in engine design and developed basic airplane control surfaces. They also pioneered the use of research tools like the wind tunnel.
Most people know them by their famous photo launching Flyer I on its successful flight attempt but they did not stop there. Airplane technology was inevitable around that time and a number of people made similar aircraft shortly after 1903. What is less know is that they were working on new aircraft the entire time and had already developed several new generations of aircraft before their invention was widely acknowledged. They developed and flew their aircraft mostly around Dayton, OH in the most secrecy possible until other inventors started making counter-claims about being the first true aviators. The Wright Brothers had to finally give a completely public demonstration where they literally flew rings around the competition because their aircraft at that point was fully functional and could do anything a small plane today could do (Flyer I from just a few years before was a nightmare to launch or control at all).
There was an interesting fight that involved the Wright Brothers, the Smithsonian and Samuel Pierpont Langley. For many years, Langely was credited by the Smithsonian as being the inventor of the first powered flight even though he did no such thing. It took a very long time for them to even be recognized as the true inventors of the airplane. In other words, if you went back to 1905 or so, they still wouldn’t have been very notable people in the popular press and even less so in the business world.
They still made some business success despite their true interests but it wasn’t enough to carry forward to this day.
They flew too close to the sun.
What’s the current consensus of opinion of the importance of Wilbur (who died early) vs Orville?
A portrait of Orville & Wilbur is printed on every US pilot’s license. So that’s one place they ended up; in a lot of back pockets & purses.
According to the very comprehensive book I just finished, Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies, Wilbur had the theoretical brilliance, and Orville was an excellent craftsman who built the various models with great precision and high quality, as well as being the better pilot. Wilbur had the stronger personality, while Orville was content to let Wilbur take the lead.
Both of them had a type of tunnel vision that convinced them that any innovation by anyone else was simply theft of their original ideas, and a moralistic streak that drove them to fight in the courts for years, suing Martin, Curtiss, et al for what amounted to total control over the aircraft industry.
I think this is a hard statement to support. Their belief that certain aircraft innovations infringed on their patents was based on factual analysis, not tunnel vision - and was largely borne out by legal judgments.
I believe the amount he sold it for was ***a cool 1915 million dollars! ***Also he lived all the way to just past the end of WWII (i.e. he saw & knew the significance of an atomic weapon delivered by aircraft). Also the Wright Company is known more for aircraft *engines *than entire airplanes.
Wilbur died on May 30, 1912 of Typhoid fever and Oriville died on January 30, 1948 of a heart attack. Neither married and both are buried in the family plot in Dayton OH.
They might not have what it took to move into jets but they were the first pilots with the wright stuff.
Related question, what was the best plane the brothers built?
During the early part of WWII, my dad was a civilian working for the US Navy Bureau of Air as an Inspector at the Columbus, OH Curtis-Wright plant. At the time, they were building Curtis SB2 Helldivers, a carrier capable dive bomber that was used from 43 to 45.
Goddamn! They were fucking Geniuses!
As mentioned by others, they spent a lot of their time fighting to defend their patents. As a result, the majority of aviation development happened overseas in Europe, not hampered by that dispute.
The Wrights realized the problem was control, and developed a technique called “wing warping” to control the aircraft. Simple weight shifting (like hang gliders) was insufficient for controlling a heavy aircraft with an engine. The Wrights’ patent included “and other methods” so they would sue builders like Curtiss over ailerons, a technology that obviously scaled up to larger, more solid aircraft.
As a result, it’s no surprise the Europeans were flying multi-engine enclosed aircraft, enclosed cockpits, and many other advances, while at the start of WWI the best the US had was not much different than the original Wright planes.
Not true. The Birdman book cited in this thread lists it at $1.5 million (which would be vastly more in 2015 dollars).