Brothers Cycle Shop

I'm here on the streets of Greenfield Village at the Henry Ford. Now to get here I had to fly from New York to Detroit. But without what happened in this building, I might have had to bike here. Yes, this is the actual bicycle shop of Orville and Wilbur Wright. This is where manned flight was invented. In 1903, two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, Orville and Wilbur Wright, invented the world's first successful airplane. But before they became aviation pioneers, the brothers owned this tiny bicycle shop. In 1938, it was moved here to the Henry Ford from Ohio. It was inside this shop that the Wright brothers would make discoveries that would change the world. Matt Anderson is curator of transportation at the Henry Ford. This is an original Wright brothers bicycle. Absolutely. So were the brothers always interested in aviation? They got into it really as young boys. Their father was a bishop with the church. He traveled a lot. He always brought back a toy for them. And one of the toys he brought back was similar to this. It was a little helicopter sort of hand held. There's was powered by a rubber band. So you'd wind it up and it would spin and take off 25, 50 feet in the air. So you just kind of . . Exactly. Oh man, oh wow. Wow. It's really fun. It is. And actually they played around with it until they broke it. And instead of just throwing it out and moving on to the next thing, they actually built new copies of it. So they were experimenting with aviation pretty early on. While a bike shop might seem In many respects the Wright brothers were in the perfect business for a couple of young men interested in pursuing aviation. The Wrights were not wealthy men and they had to work. But since the bike business was seasonal, they could use the money they earned in the s First they experimented with relatively basic gliders. Then they tried to crack the code on controlled powered flight. Turns out part of the answer had been right in front of them all along. Other inventors were trying to build rigid airplanes that would be easy to fly. But as a result, wouldn't give the pilot much control. The Wright brothers figured if a person can learn to ride a vehicle that seems unstable at first, such as a bicycle, with practice a pilot could learn to fly a plane that was difficult to master but gave the pilot more control. A lot of people thought that you had to build an airplane that was inherently stable. The Wrights came about it the entire opposite direction. They realized that you could have an inherently unstable aircraft and just learn to master it to the point where it became second nature, The Wrights also studied birds and looked for aviation inspiration from our feathered friends. Wilbur was in here in 1899 one day talking to a customer and just kind of absentmindedly twisting an inner tube box and that made him realize, well, if he hooked up some controls to the wings, he could make the wings twist just Wasn't long and they had created what they hoped would be the first powered flying machine. They called it the Flyer. They headed to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where they would put the Flyer to the test. It was an icy wind and 33 degree temps and they did it. They were successful as this iconic photograph shows. On that December day in 1903, the Wrights took the Flyer off four times. Orville made the first flight. It lasted 12 seconds and traveled 120 feet. That's from me to you. Or the equivalent of 40 yards on a football field. Shorter than the current wingspan of a Boeing 747. That day, everything changed. The Wright brothers did so much more than make the first successful flights. Through their courage, they inspired generations to dream, to reach higher. Through science and tenacity. The rest, as they say, is history.