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Famous families are everywhere, from our favourite story books to reality TV.But siblings that play together stay together - and history is littered with ones who buddied up to contribute wonderful things to art, literature and science. We’ve taken a look at four successful bands of siblings.

A fairy tale ending: The brothers Grimm

Can you imagine a world without Snow White, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood? If it weren’t for Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, these tales might not have survived in the way we know them today. While the origins of these folk tales predate the brothers by centuries, they were the first to collect the stories and publish them in an anthology, in 1812.

Like in many fairy tales, the Grimm brothers had a rags-to-riches story with a difficult start. They were born in Hanau, Germany, and when their father died, the elder brother Jacob became head of the household of five other children at just age 11. Their grandfather urged them to focus on schooling to secure a future with financial support from their aunt - they’re reported to have studied for as long as 12 hours a day!

Despite the family living in poverty, which would usually prevent them from admittance, both brothers were accepted into university where they became interested in German law, history and folklore. To preserve their culture under Napoleonic rule, they collected 86 tales and compiled them into an anthology under the name Children’s and Household Tales, which would later be printed in other countries as Grimms’ Fairy Tales. The anthology expanded to contain 200 stories and was listed by UNESCO as a Memory of the World. The best-known tales live on today.

Penning a legacy: the Brontë sisters

Charlotte, Emily and Anne were the three (of five) Brontë sisters to survive childhood, along with their brother Branwell, and their close-knit friendship and passion for writing resulted in some of the most-loved novels in history. Born within four years of each other (1816-1820) in Yorkshire, England, the sisters were often left at home alone in the isolated countryside, which inspired the settings in many of their books.

Back then it was common not to credit authors, instead noting who it was ‘edited by’, but the sisters had to take it one step further and publish their novels under male names to ensure privacy and write freely about ‘unfeminine’ topics. Under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, Charlotte wrote Jayne Eyre, Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, and Anne wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, among others, each exploring taboo issues in Victorian society such as social reform, abuse and alcoholism. It was only when they were thought to be one author that they revealed their separate identities to the world - even their publishers didn’t know in the beginning, though some critics suspected.

While Anne’s book is the less famous of the three, it was very successful at the time and even outsold Wuthering Heights. To date there have been over 16 film adaptations of Jane Eyre, and many more media retellings.

Soaring support: the Wright siblings

Wilbur and Orville Wright are famous for pioneering the first motor-powered aeroplane in 1903, but a lot of their success is owed to the support of their lesser-known younger sister. Katharine ‘Kitty’ Wright worked closely with her brothers and managed their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, while also teaching and keeping the family home, so they could concentrate on their flight projects. Kitty was the only one of the five Wright siblings to attend college and earn a degree, and she learned French to promote the brothers’ work via journalists and the social scene in France. When Orville suffered a near-fatal flight crash, Kitty stuck to his side while he healed, and she was made a board member of the Wright Brothers’ company until it was sold after Wilbur’s death.

Kitty would later make her mark on the Ohio women’s suffrage movement, and is often credited for organising a 1000-person march in Dayton, USA, which Orville and their father also attended to support.

Progress in motion: Lumière brothers

Speaking of media, this other brother duo pioneered the first viable film camera. Auguste and Louis Lumière lived in Lyon, France, and worked for their father Antoine, who was a photographer. At just 17, Louis invented a new way to process developing film, which bolstered the family business enough to open a new factory.

After seeing a Paris exhibition of Thomas Edison’s peephole film-projection device, the Kinotoscope, Antoine urged the brothers to focus on an invention that could capture and project film onto a screen. Auguste started experimenting and by the following year the brothers had made their own three-in-one device which recorded, developed and projected motion pictures. They named it the Cinématographe - sounds familiar! In March 1895 they filmed their workers leaving the Lumière factory, and this is considered to be one of the earliest moving pictures in history.

The Cinématographe was slower than the Kinetoscope but more efficient as it was quiet and used less film, though it still couldn’t fit in your pocket. A year and 40 films later, the Lumières had shown screenings of their short (very short - the longest they produced was 20 minutes) films in Brussels, New York and London, and the exciting new art of ‘cinema’ was born. The brothers went on to perfect the first colour photo process too, so we have a lot to say merci for.

This article was published in April 2023