PHILADELPHIA -- When Orville Wright donated hundreds of documents and drawings to a local science museum, he probably didn't think it would take 50 years for the public to see them.
The Wright Brothers' Aeronautical Engineering Collection, housed at the Franklin Institute Science Museum, includes handwritten notes, sketches, model airfoils, and the only existing diagram of their plane first flown near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The institute has digitized most of the documents and objects and put the collection online.
The official launch date on Thursday marks the 95th anniversary of the brothers' first flight, 17 December 1903.
"What's wonderful is this collection really shows how the Wright brothers were thinking," said senior curator John Alviti. "It's an intellectual history but using different kinds of resources."
Orville Wright bequeathed the data, logbooks, drawings, and objects to the Franklin Institute. He died in 1948; his brother Wilbur died in 1912. The two men are credited with inventing the forerunner to the modern-day airplane.
The Franklin Institute, which has the largest collection of Wright materials in the world, has kept most of the collection in vaults and climate-controlled rooms, lacking space to properly display all the items. So, few people, except aviation researchers, have seen the archives.
"The real guts of this story is that previous to 1899 other famous aeronautical people did work to determine what the co-efficients were for planes," said Steve Baumann, the institute's director of educational technology. "[The Wright brothers] experimented with shapes of wings to determine the constants -- the forces of flight -- and they discovered that the co-efficients were wrong. It's the story of how they became scientific." The collection also includes airfoils, small models of wings that the brothers tested in a wind tunnel they designed and built in 1901. The frugal brothers made notes of their experiments on hundreds of wallpaper scraps, a portion of which can be seen on the site.
Some images are displayed with QuickTime VR and animation graphics.
Karen Elinich, the institute's director of technology-learning programs, said properly displaying all the airfoils would take up too much space in the museum. The institute's four-story building covers a square city block, but it's a general-interest science museum and not strictly devoted to aviation.
The Franklin Institute was founded in 1824 to honor Ben Franklin and his inventions. Officials at the institute were among the earliest supporters of the Wrights. The two bicycle mechanics from Ohio took up flying as a hobby and struggled to defend their patents and get recognition for their work.
The complete archives include equipment, newspaper clippings, medallions presented to the brothers, and pictures of Orville Wright with Amelia Earhart.
Alviti said the museum hopes to have the entire collection online by 2003. The biggest value to digitizing the collection is that it allows the curator and the public to manipulate the objects, he said.
"You can make that plane fly. You can pull it apart. It's like Christmas when you're five years old, being able to do that for the first time."
