off-season, to test their inventions 

 on the remote Outer Banks. The 

 grueling trip by rail, boat and horse 

 cart would generally take five to 

 seven days, says Darrell Collins, 

 park historian. 



The brothers' interest in flight 

 had strange beginnings, true to the 

 tendency throughout history for 

 simple events to unleash life-altering 

 changes. 



It all started as 

 Orville lay sick in bed, 

 starving and dehydrating 

 from typhoid fever. 

 Wilbur read to his 

 invalid brother every 

 day; but one day, he 

 forgot to bring a book. 

 So he picked up a news- 

 paper. From it, he read 

 aloud an article about 

 the death of Otto 

 Lilienthal, a German 

 engineer who was killed 

 as he tested a flying 

 machine in Berlin. 



The article said that 

 Lilienthal' s machine 

 worked, but only for a 

 while, and then it 

 stopped. To a pair of 

 mechanics, this didn't 

 sound right. A machine either works 

 or it doesn't. 



Wilbur's interest in flight was 

 rekindled. As children, he and Orville 

 had been fascinated by a toy flying 

 machine their father had brought home 

 from the world's fair, Collins says. 

 It flew like a helicopter, powered by 

 twisted rubber bands. The brothers 

 learned to reproduce the toy after 

 breaking and repairing it, discovering 

 that the larger they built it the worse 

 it flew. 



As an adult seeking direction in 

 his life, Wilbur quietly pondered the 

 puzzle of flight for several years 

 before it ignited a passion in 1899, and 

 he wrote to the Smithsonian Institu- 

 tion for literature. Dismayed that so 

 many great minds had made so little 

 progress, the Wrights launched their 

 work. In 1900, Wilbur wrote a long- 



time friend that, "For some years, I 

 have been afflicted with the belief that 

 flight is possible to man." He took the 

 lead in the early stages, but he eventu- 

 ally drew in his younger brother as an 

 equal collaborator. Orville, in the 

 meantime, had recovered from typhoid 

 and returned to building and racing 

 bicycles. 



Together, the brothers began 

 experimenting with large kites, but 



Michael Halmmski 



Park ranger John Gillikin describes early flight in front of a model 

 of the first aircraft piloted by Orville Wright. 



Within two generations, 

 air travel had become routine, 



the sound barrier had been 

 broken by an aircraft and man 

 had walked on the moon. 

 Today, we celebrate the brothers' 

 ingenuity and persistence through 

 history books and the Wright 

 Brothers National Memorial 

 at Kill Devil Hills. 

 The aviation industry that 

 was born from their discovery 

 is now a significant segment 

 of the U.S. economy. 



they quickly learned that Dayton was 

 not the place to try flying manned 

 gliders. They sought guidance from 

 the U.S. Department of Agriculture 

 Weather Service, which pointed them 



to an isolated stretch of beach called 

 Kitty Hawk. There, the winds blew 

 strong and the barren sand clearings 

 were soft and flat for landings. 



Their first nights at Kitty Hawk 

 were spent in a tent on the beach. 

 Wilbur later wrote in his diary that he 

 had solved the mysterious disappear- 

 ance of Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost 

 Colony from the Outer Banks. "The 

 mosquitoes ate them all." 



That year, 1900, 

 the Wrights began 

 learning to fly gliders, 

 but their results were 

 discouraging. They 

 started by testing the 

 gliders as kites, control- 

 ling them from the 

 ground. When they 

 advanced to piloted 

 gliders, the aircraft 

 stayed aloft only a few 

 seconds. The brothers 

 concluded that perhaps 

 their 17-foot glider was 

 too small to fly, so they 

 returned to Ohio to 

 build a larger model. 



They tested the 

 new 22-foot model in 

 the spring of 1901 at a 

 dune field now known 

 as Kill Devil Hills, but their experi- 

 ments were no more successful. They 

 finally packed up and went home after 

 Wilbur split his head in a glider acci- 

 dent. This, and the realization that 

 they had based their work on other 

 researchers' unreliable data, led 

 Wilbur to conclude that "man would 

 never fly in a thousand years." 



At home, however, the interest in 

 flight continued to burn through 

 Wilbur. And for the first time in their 

 lives, the brothers didn't give up. They 

 started over with laboratory tests. 



In the fall of 1901, Orville built a 

 wind tunnel that quite possibly saved 

 their lives. It was a long, open-ended 

 rectangular box with a fan in the back 

 that allowed them to test the lifting 

 ability of 200 different wing shapes 

 using the knowledge that wind passing 

 over and under a surface will keep it 



4 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1995 



