Today the aeroplanes cut through the air with great speed. There are many different designs, and daring young men are eager to manage these swift flying crafts.
However, it is but a short time since two American boys made the first successful flights in the United States and started a factory for building aeroplanes. Wilbur and Orville Wright lived in Dayton, Ohio. Their father was a minister, who spent his spare time working with tools. Once he invented a typewriter, but it was never put on the market. The boys were interested in his workshop, and while very young began to find their greatest pleasure in making things that would go.
It was in the year 1879, when Orville was eight years old, that his father brought home a toy that made a great impression on the boyish mind. It was called a heliocopter, but the Wright boys called it “the bat.” Made of bamboo, cork, and thin paper, it had two propellers that revolved in opposite directions by the untwining of rubber bands that controlled them. When thrown against the ceiling, it would hover in the air for a time. They made many models of this toy, but after a time they became tired of it and wanted to build something more difficult.
Photograph from Dayton, Ohio, Journal
ORVILLE WRIGHT
Joint Inventor of the Aeroplane
Their first venture was a printing press; and when Orville was fifteen years of age, they were publishing a four-page paper called the Midget. They did all the work from editor to delivery boys.
Just about this time the bicycle craze passed over the country. Everyone rode a wheel. Automobiles were unknown, and the new machines, that could be ridden so fast along the highways, seemed a wonderful invention. The Wright brothers had no money to buy a bicycle, so they made one. You may laugh when you hear that they used a piece of old gas pipe for the frame, but nevertheless they succeeded in their undertaking and could ride as well on their home-made machine as their friends did on expensive, high-grade ones. No doubt they had many long rides and great sport with the bicycle they had built, but the Wright brothers always found their greatest pleasure in making things rather than in using them. Therefore, it did not seem strange to any one when they said they wanted something better than a bicycle; but when it became known that instead of riding rapidly over city streets and country roads they wanted to fly through the air like birds, the people were amazed and thought the two boys had lost their wits.