Related Resources

Library of Congress

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
101 Independence Avenue, S.E., Washington, DC 20540-4730

Notable holdings of images related to the Wright brothers but not taken by them include:

LOT 11512-A (H) Mabel Beck's (secretary to Orville Wright) collection of photographs of Wright brothers overseas trips, portraits, and early flight tests at Dayton, Ohio and Kitty Hawk, N.C.; 74 photographs made ca. 1881-1946, bulk 1909. The bulk of the photographs show the brothers in Europe in 1909 to promote their airplane through training and exhibition flights. Includes them meeting with nobility and other officials at Pau, France; Orville Wright with Ferdinand Zeppelin, the Crown Prince of Germany, and others while in Berlin and Potsdam, Germany; the brothers in Rome with the King of Italy; views of early Wright planes and record flights performed in the U.S., including tests at Kitty Hawk, N.C., and Simms Station, Dayton, Ohio; one photograph documenting the start of the first commercial flight from Dayton to Columbus, Ohio, 1910. Also portraits of Milton and Catherine Wright; portraits of Orville and Wilbur Wright; Orville visiting Henry Ford's plant in Dearborn, Mich., and posing with Henry Ford; an interior view of the Wright factory, 1913; photographs of the Wright bank and incidence indicators; one view of the Wright brothers bicycle shop at Dayton, Ohio; one bust sculpture of Wilbur Wright; monuments to the brothers, including one distant view of the Kitty Hawk monument; a greeting card signed by Orville Wright that includes a photograph of his home "Hawthorne Hill"; one view of the Wright airplane on exhibit at the Science Museum, London.

LOT 10965 (F) George Grantham Bain collection of new photos of aviation activities of Orville and Wilbur Wright, 1908-17. Approximately 100 images in the following subdivisions: LOT 10965-1 Orville Wright's tests at Ft. Myer, VA, 1908-09; LOT 10965-2 Wilbur Wright's flights over New York harbor, 1909; LOT 10965-3 Miscellaneous images, 1908-17, including portraits, planes, trophies and Wilbur Wright's funeral.

LOT 6131 (F) Ernest L. Jones collection of photographs concerning the history of aviation, including Army Signal Corps photographs relating to the flight trials of the Wright Brothers at Ft. Myer, VA, 1908-09

LOT 8131 (G) Alfred Hildebrandt collection of twelve photographs of Orville Wright's flights in Germany, 1909. Also includes Wright gliders. Captioned in German.

BIOGRAPHICAL FILE Includes photographs of the Wright brothers and their flights.

Library of Congress, Manuscript Division 101 Independence Avenue, S.E., Washington DC 20540-4683

The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, 1881-1973 (bulk 1900-1948). Includes correspondence, diaries, notebooks, business accounts, legal papers, minutes, reports, illustrative matter, photographs, and printed material. The notebooks contain scientific and meteorological observations made at the time of the Kitty Hawk experiments and other flights. The photographs are in Containers 65 and 86-87. The images in Container 65 are in a folder labeled "Chanute, Octave, Photographs from Kitty Hawk, N.C., 1901-02," and are mostly 3x5 inch photographs of the Wright Brothers' camp in Kitty Hawk. The images in Containers 86-87 were collected by Marvin W. McFarland for his book, Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, including the Chanute-Wright letters and other papers of Octave Chanute (McGraw-Hill, 1953), and include photographic prints made from the glass plate negatives.

Outside the Library of Congress

Special Collections and Archives, Paul Laurence Dunbar Library Wright State University Dayton, OH, 45435
(937) 775-2092
http://www.libraries.wright.edu/special/about/about_dunbar.html

Contains the 6,000 items from the Wright estate which were not selected by the Library for inclusion in its collections. This includes over 200 technical books, journals, and pamphlets accumulated by the brothers, family records and diaries, and copy photographs made from the original glass plate negatives. A full description is available at the Wright State University's web site. In addition, the archives holds over 70 other manuscript collections relating to the history of flight.

"'To Fly is Everything...' A Virtual Museum covering the Invention of the Airplane"
http://invention.psychology.msstate.edu/i/Wrights/Wright_photos.html

The creator of this site scanned all 301 photographs from the microfiche publication Photographs by the Wright Brothers: Prints from the Glass Negatives in the Library of Congress: a Micropublication Commemorating the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the First Flight by the Wright Brothers, December 17, 1903 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1978) and displayed them in the context of an exhibit on the invention of flight. This site is not maintained by the Library of Congress, but it does contain Library of Congress reproduction numbers (e.g. LC-USZ62-56239), with which photographic copies can be ordered through the Library of Congress Photoduplication Service.