What happened after the Wright brothers flew the first plane?

To put this in context, when the Wright brothers made their flight they were by no means the only people building aeroplanes, The first flight of a heavier than air vehicle had been some years earlier ( Stringfellow, Chard, England ). So the Wright brothers flight was not so much a starting point as another step in the development of heavier than air machines which had been making progress for some years. The progress however was largely slow until two world wars resulted in massive leaps forward, and the later 'Cold War' era which fueled most of the developments seen in modern aircraft.

No one country made all the progress, but the British, Germans, French, Americans, Russians, and Czechs have tended to lead the way with most of the development work.