Wilbur and Orville Wright were born in Daytona, Ohio. Wilbur was born on April 6, 1867. Orville was born on August 19, 1871. Their father was a minister. Later their father was elected bishop. There were 4 boys and 1 girl in the Wright family.  Their mother died when the boys were teenagers from tuberculosis.  Both boys dropped out of high school. Orville quit school before his senior year to start a printing press. The Wright family moved during Wilbur’s senior year so he never finished high school. Wilbur and Orville owned a printing firm, at the age of 22 and 18, then a repair business. They later opened up a bicycle shop. They sold homemade mechanical toys. Neither man ever married. Wilbur died of typhoid fever May 30, 1912. Orville took Wilbur’s death hard. Orville retired from the airplane business and gave up flying a few years after Wilbur’s death. Orville died January 30, 1948.  

My inventors invented the airplane. The invention was invented in their bicycle shop, August of 1900. Wilbur built his first glider. The invention was made for people to get around places. They were fascinated by flight at an early age. Four years before Kitty Hawk they built a small model of an airplane. It took them 3 ½ years to go from a glider plane to an engine plane. They had problems with the wings on the glider plane. They crashed their first plane. Their first plane was a skeleton flying machine of spruce, ash, and muslin. It had a wingspan of 40 feet and an unmanned weight of just over 600 pounds. On May 1906 they received a patent on their flying machine. Someone tried to steal their patent and they won the lawsuit in 1914. Their invention made them wealthy. The plane made them famous. At first people didn’t take them seriously. But eventually they did. A company in Germany bought the contract for their invention.