So to do this and buy materials with which to build their new machine, they opened a bicycle repair shop. It was in the shed back of this shop that they first made their models of air craft. They had no wealthy friends to back them with money. They had no chance to go abroad, where clever men were being urged by their governments to make experiments with what the world called “flying machines.” They were not able to go to college or to any school where they could obtain help in working out their plan, so they started in to study by themselves what the German, French, and English inventors had to say about the art of flying.
Seemingly, nothing discouraged them. Everywhere the newspapers and magazines were poking fun at mad inventors who thought men would some day soar through the air as birds do. There was a Professor Langley, a man much older than the Wright brothers, who finished a machine in 1896. It flew perfectly, on the sixth day of May in that year. The flight was made near Washington, D. C., along the Potomac river for the distance of about three-quarters of a mile. He made another successful flight in November. Then the United States Government urged him to build a full-sized machine, capable of carrying a man. He completed this machine in 1903 and attempted to launch it on the seventh day of October in that year. An accident caused the machine to fall into the Potomac. The aviator was thrown out and came near drowning. Professor Langley tried to 103 launch his machine again in December and the same accident occurred. The machine was broken. The newspapers made cruel fun of Professor Langley; he was criticized in the U. S. Congress; and overcome by grief at the failure of his great idea he tried no more. Two years later he died, crushed and broken in spirit.
But the Wright brothers did not let any such unkind comment hinder their work. They kept on studying the flight of birds. Lying flat on their backs they would watch birds for whole afternoons at a time, until at last they came to believe that a bird himself is really an aeroplane. The parts of the wings close to the body are supporting planes, while the portions that can be flapped are the propellers. Watch a hawk or a buzzard soaring and you will see they move their wings but little. They balance themselves on the rising currents of air. A hawk finds that on a clear warm day the air currents are high and rise with a rotary motion. That is why we see these birds go sailing round and round. When you see one poised above a steep hill on a damp, windy day you may be sure he is balancing himself in the air which rises from its slope and he will be able to glide down at will.
The Wright brothers were certain if they could balance a machine in the air they could make it go. To find out how to do this they made a difficult experiment with delicate sheets of metal balanced in a long tube. Through this tube steady currents of air were blown. The speed with which the currents were sent through the tube 104 was changed often, as well as the angles of sending. Over and over they did this, until they were sure of the same results each time. They knew how to plan the shape of a surface that would do what they wanted it to in the air, and they were soon ready to make a trial flight with their aeroplane.
The United States Weather Bureau told them the winds were strongest and steadiest at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and there they made their first test flights in 1900. That year they had only two minutes of actual sailing in the air. But they went back the next year and the next, learning more each time, and working untiringly.
One day Dr. Octave Chanute, the man who knew more than any one else in the United States about flying, appeared suddenly at Kitty Hawk. He watched them, and gave as his opinion that they had gone farther than any one else in this new art. Cheered by his words they began to work harder. Now that they could balance in the air they must make their machine go.
It took them a year to learn to turn a corner. During the years 1904 and 1905, they made 154 flights. At last they were ready, in 1909, to make a test for our government. The United States said it would pay $25,000 for a machine capable of going forty miles an hour. Every mile above this speed would be paid for at the rate of $2500 and for every mile less than this down to the rate of thirty-six miles an hour they would deduct 105 $2500 from the purchase money. The flight was to be in a measured course of five miles from Ft. Meyer to Alexandria, Va. It was not an easy flight, and it was considered to be more difficult than crossing the English Channel, a feat then engaging the attention of Europeans.
Orville Wright with one passenger made the flight in fourteen minutes and forty-two seconds, a rate of speed a little more than forty-two miles an hour. Army officers then went to him to learn how to manage the machine, for even then it was believed the greatest use of the aeroplane would be in war.
When Orville Wright was succeeding in this country, Wilbur Wright went to France with one of their machines. At first the French people laughed, made cartoons of him and his machine, even wrote a song about his effort; but he soon rose above all such petty and silly things. The French people began to see the progress the Americans were making and took hold of the new invention more rapidly than any other nation.