Before any successful powered flight, most airplane designs envisaged monoplanes. The weakness of the materials and design techniques available made it difficult to design wings which were both light and strong enough to fly. Many designs used external bracing struts and wires. The Cody kite, which comprised a box kite with wings attached to its upper surfaces, took a different approach. By 1896 Octave Chanute was flying a biplane hang glider and concluded that the externally braced biplane offered better prospects for powered flight than the monoplane. The Wright Flyer biplane of 1903 became the first successful powered airplane.
Throughout the pioneer years, both biplanes and monoplanes were common, but by the outbreak of the First World War biplanes had started to gain favor due to their better maneuverability and inherent strength, as external bracing to create a clean "cantilever" wing. . But by the 1930s engine power had risen to the point where the fast cantilever monoplane — first flown by the end of 1915, as a pioneering all-metal design from the workshops founded by Hugo Junkers — took over and the slower biplane designs began to be phased out.
