More Wrights

I finished my Wright Brothers book. Really good. I thought I would write about the top interesting things I learned or was reminded of from reading the book. Here we go.

1. They worked really hard to fly. They didn't just stumble on to this. They owned print and bicycle shops, but they got more and more into learning to fly. They worked all the time at it. They didn't just luck out in learning to fly. They studied what other people did, built their own wind tunnel, and testing their ideas on gliders in the wind. They took several trips to Kitty Hawk living in a shed to do experiments years before they were successful.

2. They rested on the Sabbath. Their father was a minister and was kind of a higher up in the church. He put out a newsletter and visited churches throughout the U.S. The brothers didn't go with him, but while they spent huge amounts of time learning about flight, they never worked on the Sabbath.

3. Their family was very important two them, but a little different. They had a sister that you don't hear much about, but she was very important to their success. She was a great encourager to them and was kind of like their manager a lot of times. The Wright brothers never married. The sister married late in life. Orville was so upset with her that she married that he wouldn't talk to her for years. They only reconciled at the end of their lives.

4. Ohio must be the flight capital of the world. The Wright brothers, John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, and the Air Force Museum (huge) are Ohioans.

5. They had health problems. Both Orville and Wilbur almost died early in life. Orville was involved in the first ever airplane fatality. He flew a plane with another person. They crashed. The passenger died and it took years for Orville to recover. Wilbur, probably due to stress over lawsuits, died young. I think he was 42.

6. They almost didn't get credit for being the first to fly. There was an earlier plane that wasn't able to fly, but years later did. The Smithsonian, and for years history books, claimed that plane was the first that was capable of flight. Finally historians sorted that out. It did indeed fly years later, but it was because its owner secretly made alterations to it in the meantime.

7. Their burial. The Wright family are buried together in Dayton. Also in the same cemetery Erma Bombeck is buried under a rock. I swear its true. I heard that, but didn't really believe it until I saw it.

There is all you need to know about the Wright Brothers. You should read the book, though, anyway.

OK, the Erma Bombeck story is weird, but not quite as weird as I thought. I found out the story about it at (I swear this is an actual website. Go there if you don't believe me.) http://www.woodlandcemetery.org/gravestone-stories