Orville and Wilbur Wright: Flying-Machine, US Patent 821,393

Edition

Scan of the printed patent linked from Google Patents (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/1c/17/b5/e1f4968143a568/US821393.pdf, 1-bit, 300 dpi; the PDF served by the USPTO, image-ppubs.uspto.gov, holds the same page images). Its first three pages, the three sheets of drawings, are set side by side in the image at the top, each cropped to the drawing, its heading and its signatures and kept in black and white, so that all the figures stay together above the text. The specification (pages 1 to 7) is transcribed in full, word for word from the scan: the Wikisource transcription of the patent (Page:Wright-Patent-US-821393.pdf/4 to /10, mostly not proofread) served as a base, and every line was checked against the page images, with the Google Patents OCR and a second OCR made for this poster as cross-checks; 113 corrections were made to the base, among them missing words (“by means of which”, “of the structure”, “this cradle”, “rope 15”, “grasped”, “with means for”, “each aeroplane, said”, “relatively to the normal plane of the body of”, “respective aeroplanes, the margins on the”), misread words (“spars” for “spans”, “provision” for “revision”, “premised” for “promised”, “present” for “resent”, “below” for “blow”, “superposed” for “superimposed”, “used” for “usual”) and stray punctuation. The printed heading (“UNITED STATES PATENT OFFICE.” / “ORVILLE WRIGHT AND WILBUR WRIGHT, OF DAYTON, OHIO.” / “FLYING-MACHINE.” / “No. 821,393. Specification of Letters Patent. Patented May 22, 1906.” / “Application filed March 23, 1903. Serial No. 149,220.”) is set in the header of the poster; the comma of the number reads like a period on the scan. Normalizations: words divided at line ends and across pages are rejoined without their hyphen, except “bracket-plate”, “supporting-surfaces”, “tiller-rope” and “cross-pieces”, compounds divided at their own hyphen, as they are printed whole elsewhere in the text or in the same kind of compound; the running heads, page numbers and the line numbers of the margins are dropped; one letter missing from a worn sort in claim 2 (“a roplanes”) is restored as “aeroplanes”. Small capitals are kept for the inventors’ names in the preamble and for the witnesses, italics for the reference letters of the corners and margins. The spelling and punctuation of the print are kept, including “the corner c” in the description of the lateral movement and “springs 36; which”. Where specks of the scan made a comma look like a semicolon, the reading of the other occurrences of the same phrase decided. The caption of the drawings is not a period text: it was written for this poster from the specification.

Rights

US Patent 821,393 was granted to Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright on 22 May 1906 and printed by the United States Patent Office. In the United States, it was published before 1931, and patents are publications of the federal government. In France, its authors died before 1 January 1956: Wilbur Wright on 30 May 1912 (Wikidata Q1396131) and Orville Wright on 30 January 1948 (Wikidata Q494455), so the term of protection has expired.

The USPTO states: “Subject to limited exceptions reflected in 37 CFR 1.71(d) & (e) and 1.84(s), the text and drawings of a patent are typically not subject to copyright restrictions.” (https://www.uspto.gov/terms-use-uspto-websites, section “Patent information”, retrieved 2026-09-27.)