Presently Orville and Wilbur
were making their own bicycles and astonishing their neighbors by
public appearances on a specially designed tandem. The first
accounts which they read of experiments with flying machines
turned their inventive genius into the new field. In particular
the newspaper accounts at that time of Otto Lilienthal's
exhibitions with his glider stirred their interest and set them
on to search the libraries for literature on the subject of
flying. As they read of the work of Langley and others they
concluded that the secret of flying could not be mastered
theoretically in a laboratory; it must be learned in the air. It
struck these young men, trained by necessity to count pennies at
their full value, as "wasteful extravagance" to mount delicate
and costly machinery on wings which no one knew how to manage.
They turned from the records of other inventors' models to study
the one perfect model, the bird. Said Wilbur Wright, speaking
before the Society of Western Engineers, at Chicago:
"The bird's wings are undoubtedly very well designed indeed, but
it is not any extraordinary efficiency that strikes with
astonishment, but rather the marvelous skill with which they are
used. It is true that I have seen birds perform soaring feats of
almost incredible nature in positions where it was not possible
to measure the speed and trend of the wind, but whenever it was
possible to determine by actual measurements the conditions under
which the soaring was performed it was easy to account for it on
the basis of the results obtained with artificial wings.
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