|
Up
How it
All Began
(You are here.)
  Need
to
find your
bearings?
Try
these
navigation aids:
If
this is your first
visit, please stop by:
Something
to share?
Please:
|
|
Available in Française, Español, Português, Deutsch, Россию,
中文,
日本, and others.
 n January 13, 1920, Orville gave a deposition in a court
case, Regina C. Montgomery et al vs. the United States. The defendants counsel,
Maxwell Barus, asked him, "When and under what circumstances did you and Wilbur
Wright first become interested in the problem of flight?" Orville's response:
"Our first interest began when we were children. Father
brought home to us a small toy actuated by a rubber spring which would lift itself into
the air. We built a number of copies of this toy, which flew successfully. By
"we" I refer to my brother Wilbur and myself. But when we undertook to build the
toy on a much larger scale it failed to work so well. The reason for this was not
understood by us at the time, so we finally abandoned the experiments. In 1896 we read in
the daily papers, or in some of the magazines, of the experiments of Otto Lilienthal, who
was making some gliding flights from the top of a small hill in Germany. His death a few
months later while making a glide off the hill increased our interest in the subject, and
we began looking for books pertaining to flight. We found a work written by Professor Marey on animal mechanism which treated of the bird mechanism as applied to flight, but
other than this, so far as I can remember, we found little.
"In the spring of the year 1899 our interest in the subject
was again aroused through the reading of a book on ornithology. We could not understand
that there was anything about a bird that would enable it to fly that could not be built
on a larger scale and used by man. At this time our thought pertained more particularly to
gliding flight and soaring. If the bird's wings would sustain it in the air without the
use of any muscular effort, we did not see why man could not be sustained by the same
means. We knew that the Smithsonian Institution had been interested in some work on the
problem of flight, and, accordingly, on the 30th of May 1899, my brother Wilbur wrote a
letter to the Smithsonian inquiring about publications on the subject..." –
Orville Wright
|
Orville Wright in flying togs, just a few years before
he gave this testimony.
|
