Wilbur Wright, together with his brother Orville, built and flew the world's first successful powered airplane in 1903. The two brothers ran a bicycle shop and used their mechanical skills to solve the problem of controlled flight that had stumped inventors for years, building their own wind tunnel to test more than 200 wing designs and inventing a wing-warping system, inspired by watching birds, to steer their aircraft. Their historic flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, launched the entire age of aviation.