Wright Company

The Wright Company was the commercial aviation business founded by Wilbur and Orville Wright on 22 November 1909, together with several prominent industrialists from New York and Detroit, to capitalise on their invention of the practical aeroplane. It kept its headquarters office in New York City and built its factory in Dayton, Ohio, in two buildings designed by the Dayton architect William Earl Russ and put up in 1910 and 1911. Those buildings were the first in the United States constructed specifically as an aeroplane factory. As a make, the Wright Company is the name carried by the Wright Model A, the Model B and the later Models C, D, E, EX, F, G, H, K, L and R. Orville Wright, who had bought 97 percent of the stock in 1914, estimated that the company built about 120 aeroplanes across all its models between 1910 and 1915. The company concentrated on protecting its patent rights rather than on developing new aircraft, and it was sold in October 1915, a year after Wilbur Wright's death in 1912 had left Orville in charge. In 1916 it merged with the Glenn L. Martin Company to form the Wright-Martin Company, whose line later led to Curtiss-Wright. The Dayton factory later passed to AC Delco and joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2019.