preview

Wright Brothers Essay

Good Essays

The brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright, possibly the two most renowned representatives of American aeronautics, were the first to experience controlled, continuous flight of a powered airplane in history. Despite being autodidactic in the area of engineering, the duo proved to be extraordinarily successful, testing and refining their strategies to overcome successive challenges that arose with the building of a plane (Crouch 226). The two were so far ahead in the race for flight that they even anticipated and found solutions to problems that more learned scientists could not have even begun to predict. Successful, man-controlled, powered flight was a fundamental turning point in history; it transformed the methods of how the United States …show more content…

In the future, this toy served as a seed planted into the brothers’ heads early on in order to give them the idea later to build aircraft that could carry human beings.
Neither of the brothers attended college, but instead, ventured forward together in becoming entrepreneurs. The two went to work in mastering the printing business, learning to work together to build their own printing presses. The teamwork between the two brothers led to the two opening a bicycle shop in 1892, at first selling and mending bikes, and later building them (Garber 2). Their success in the bicycle business led to their nickname, “The Wright Brothers,” and produced a reputation for their mechanical designs. Their skills and profits gained from mechanizing and building these bicycles would give them the basic knowledge and funding to help in their endeavors to mechanize aircraft later on (Garber 2). The boys’ experiences of working together and crafting printers and bicycles gave the two brothers skills that would be later used for their greatest challenge, flight. The Wright brothers did not simply forget the helicopter toy that their father brought home, dreams of man-controlled aviation still lingered in the brothers’ heads. The aviation endeavors of German aviator, Otto Lilienthal, sparked the duo’s earlier interest in aviation, which gave rise to the brothers beginning to devote their mechanical and design skills to solving the mystery behind

Get Access