First, Wilbur and Orville Wright bought a small printing press and started a weekly newspaper in Dayton, Ohio. Then, they opened a bicycle shop. But they wanted to do something else: they wanted to build a flying machine. And that’s what they did.

To get started, they experimented with gliders, like the one pictured here. That’s how they figured out how to cotrol their plane during flight. Then, they added a small engine with a propeller on the back.

In 1903, they took their invention to the windy sand dunes near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina and tossed a coin to see which brother got to fly first. Wilbur won and made a short, three-second flight.  But soon the brothers were making longer flights. Their high-flying invention worked! It was the very first motor-powered airplane.

Quotes from Famous Inventors

“I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident. They came by work.”
Thomas Edison

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.”
Henry Ford

“When one door closes, another door opens; but we often look so long and regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones that are open to us.”
Alexander Graham Bell

“The Wright Brothers flew right through the smokescreen of impossibility.”
Charles Kettering

“The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.”
Henry Ford