Check out the book The Wright Brothers by David McCullough[1]. You will see that they are anything but tinkerers, but more the founders of aeronautical engineering.
But don't forget that they also threatened to hold the entire aircraft industry hostage with a overly broad patent and then spent years trying to rewrite history so they got most if not all of the credit. Even their gift of their flyer to the Smithsonian came with strings attached about how the Smithsonian could frame other developments at the time.
http://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/History_of_the_A...