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The american brothers who really flew for the first time

There was the first aeroplane, and it had lain for eleven years unrealised and unused. Now, with Langley in his grave, the splendour of his invention was revealed.

So that it was an American who gave us the first aeroplane; and it was an American who made the first flight. Wilbur and Orville Wright, born at Newcastle, Indiana, in 1867, are the actual accomplishers of human flight. Wilbur was the elder. Their father was a modest local preacher; their sister Catherine was a school teacher; the two lads were among Nature’s nobility. They were eager scholars at school; they set up in business as printers, and added bicycle-making and bicycle-mending to their calling. It was in 1896, the year in which Langley’s model flew, that they took up the study of aircraft. They read all they could read on the subject, made many experiments in their little bicycle shop, and found many theories wrong, inaccurate, even dangerous.