In the months and years following their first flights, the Wrights were acclaimed by nations and by men. They knew success in the fullest measure. But probably no subsequent achievement quite equaled the thrill which must have been theirs when they were able to send to their father and sister that now famous message:
“Success four flights Thursday morning all against twenty-one-mile wind started from level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty-one miles longest 59 seconds inform press home Christmas.”
An idea is born
The shop of the Wright Cycle Company on West Third Street in Dayton ... birthplace of the aeroplane.
The Wright brothers sprang from pioneers who settled Dayton when the Ohio country was young. Their father, the Reverend Milton Wright, became a bishop of the United Brethren Church. His vocation necessitated frequent changes of residence. Thus it came about that Wilbur was born April 16, 1867, on a farm eight miles from Newcastle, Indiana, while Orville was born in a house at 7 Hawthorn Street in Dayton. This house was the Wright home for more than forty years.
From earliest childhood, the boys were mechanically minded. They had both the inclination and the aptitude for creative work. The pioneering urge and the gift of original thinking were theirs.
An issue of the “West Side News,” an early Wright venture.
One day the Bishop came home from a short trip, bringing the children a present. He held something in his hands and then tossed it toward them. It was a toy helicopter. Instead of flopping to the floor, it ascended to the ceiling where it fluttered before it fell. That helicopter set up a milepost in the lives of the Wright boys. The idea of their future conquest of the air, in all likelihood, was born then and there.