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The Wright Brothers - Example of Daring Lead Us To Success
The Wright Brothers - Example of Daring Lead Us To Success
The Wright Brothers - Example of Daring Lead Us To Success
The story of Wilbur and Orville Wright. The Wright Brothers made a
small engine-powered flying machine and proved that it was
possible for humans to really fly. Wilbur Wright was born in
Eighteen-Sixty-Seven near Melville, Indiana. His brother Orville was
born four years later in Dayton, Ohio. Throughout their lives, they
were best friends. As Wilbur once said: "From the time we were
little children, Orville and I lived together, played together, worked
together and thought together." Wilbur and Orville''s father was a
bishop, an official of the United Brethren Church. He traveled a lot
on church business. Their mother was unusual for a woman of the
nineteenth century. She had completed college. She was especially
good at mathematics and science. And she was good at using tools
to fix things or make things. One winter day when the Wright
brothers were young, all their friends were outside sliding down a
hill on wooden sleds. The Wright brothers were sad, because they
did not have a sled. So, Missus Wright said she would make one for
them. She drew a picture of a sled. It did not look like other sleds. It
was lower to the ground and not as wide. She told the boys it would
be faster, because there would be less resistance from the wind
when they rode on it. Missus Wright was correct. When the sled was
finished, it was the fastest one around. Wilbur and Orville felt like
they were flying. The sled project taught the Wright brothers two
important rules. They learned they could increase speed by
reducing wind resistance. And they learned the importance of
drawing a design. Missus Wright said: "If you draw it correctly on
paper, it will be right when you build it." When Wilbur was eleven
years old and Orville seven, Bishop Wright brought home a gift for
them. It was a small flying machine that flew like helicopters of
today. It was made of paper, bamboo and cork. The motor was a
rubber band that had to be turned many times until it was tight.
When the person holding the toy helicopter let go, it rose straight
up. It stayed in the air for a few seconds. Then it floated down to
the floor. Wilbur and Orville played and played with their new toy.
Finally, the paper tore and the rubber band broke. They made
another one. But it was too heavy to fly. Their first flying machine
failed. Their attempts to make the toy gave them a new idea. They
would make kites to fly and sell to their friends. They made many
designs and tested them. Finally, they had the right design. The
kites flew as though they had wings. The Wright brothers continued
to experiment with mechanical things. Orville started a printing
business when he was in high school. He used a small printing
machine to publish a newspaper. He sold copies of the newspaper to
the other children in school, but he did not earn much money from
the project. Wilbur offered some advice to his younger brother.
Make the printing press bigger and publish a bigger newspaper, he
said. So, together, they designed and built one. The machine looked
strange. Yet it worked perfectly. Soon, Orville and Wilbur were
publishing a weekly newspaper. They also printed materials for local
businessmen. They were finally earning money. Wilbur was twentyfive years old and Orville twenty-one when they began to sell and
repair bicycles. Then they began to make them. But the Wright
brothers never stopped thinking about flying machines. In EighteenNinety-Nine, Wilbur decided to learn about all the different kinds of
flying machines that had been designed and tested through the
years. Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
He asked for all the information it had on flying. The Wright
brothers read everything they could about people who sailed
through the air under huge balloons. They also read about people
who tried to fly on gliders -- planes with wings, but no motors. Then
the Wright brothers began to design their own flying machine. They
used the ideas they had developed from their earlier experiments
with the toy helicopter, kites, printing machine and bicycles. Soon,
they needed a place to test their ideas about flight. They wrote to
the Weather Bureau in Washington to find the place with the best
wind con***ions. The best place seemed to be a thin piece of sandy
land in North Carolina along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. It was
called Kill Devil Hill, near the town of Kitty Hawk. It had the right
wind and open space. Best of all, it was private. In NineteenHundred, the Wright brothers tested a glider that could carry a
person. But neither the first or second glider they built had the
lifting power needed for real flight. Wilbur and Orville decided that
what they had read about air pressure on curved surfaces was
wrong. So they built a wind tunnel two meters long in their bicycle
store in Dayton, Ohio. They tested more than two-hundred designs
of wings. These tests gave them the correct information about air
pressure on curved surfaces. Now it was possible for them to design
a machine that could fly. The Wright brothers built a third glider.