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Welcome to People in America from VOA Special English. Today,Sarah Long and Rich Kleinfeldt tell the story of Wilbur and OrvilleWright. The Wright Brothers made a small engine-powered flyingmachine and proved that it was possible for humans to really fly.
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Wilbur Wright was born in Eighteen-Sixty-Seven near Melville,Indiana. His brother Orville was born four years later in Dayton,Ohio. Throughout their lives, they were best friends. As Wilbur oncesaid: “From the time we were little children, Orville and I livedtogether, played together, worked together and thought together.”
Wilbur and Orville’s father was a bishop, an official of theUnited Brethren Church. He traveled a lot on church business. Theirmother was unusual for a woman of the nineteenth century. She hadcompleted college. She was especially good at mathematics andscience. And she was good at using tools to fix things or makethings.
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One winter day when the Wright brothers were young, all theirfriends were outside sliding down a hill on wooden sleds. The Wrightbrothers were sad, because they did not have a sled. So, MissusWright said she would make one for them. She drew a picture of asled. It did not look like other sleds. It was lower to the groundand not as wide. She told the boys it would be faster, because therewould be less resistance from the wind when they rode on it. MissusWright was correct. When the sled was finished, it was the fastestone around. Wilbur and Orville felt like they were flying.
The sled project taught the Wright brothers two important rules.They learned they could increase speed by reducing wind resistance.And they learned the importance of drawing a design. Missus Wrightsaid: “If you draw it correctly on paper, it will be right when youbuild it.”
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When Wilbur was eleven years old and Orville seven, Bishop Wrightbrought home a gift for them. It was a small flying machine thatflew like helicopters of today. It was made of paper, bamboo andcork.
The motor was a rubber band that had to be turned many timesuntil it was tight. When the person holding the toy helicopter letgo, it rose straight up. It stayed in the air for a few seconds.Then it floated down to the floor.
Wilbur and Orville played and played with their new toy. Finally,the paper tore and the rubber band broke. They made another one. Butit was too heavy to fly. Their first flying machine failed.
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Their attempts to make the toy gave them a new idea. They wouldmake kites to fly and sell to their friends. They made many designsand tested them. Finally, they had the right design. The kites flewas though they had wings.
The Wright brothers continued to experiment with mechanicalthings. Orville started a printing business when he was in highschool. He used a small printing machine to publish a newspaper. Hesold copies of the newspaper to the other children in school, but hedid not earn much money from the project.
VOICE ONE:
Wilbur offered some advice to his younger brother. Make theprinting press bigger and publish a bigger newspaper, he said. So,together, they designed and built one. The machine looked strange.Yet it worked perfectly. Soon, Orville and Wilbur were publishing aweekly newspaper.
They also printed materials for local businessmen. They werefinally earning money. Wilbur was twenty-five years old and Orvilletwenty-one when they began to sell and repair bicycles. Then theybegan to make them. But the Wright brothers never stopped thinkingabout flying machines.
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In Eighteen-Ninety-Nine, Wilbur decided to learn about all thedifferent kinds of flying machines that had been designed and testedthrough the years. Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution inWashington. He asked for all the information it had on flying.
The Wright brothers read everything they could about people whosailed through the air under huge balloons. They also read aboutpeople who tried to fly on gliders — planes with wings, but nomotors.
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Then the Wright brothers began to design their own flyingmachine. They used the ideas they had developed from their earlierexperiments with the toy helicopter, kites, printing machine andbicycles.
Soon, they needed a place to test their ideas about flight. Theywrote to the Weather Bureau in Washington to find the place with thebest wind conditions. The best place seemed to be a thin piece ofsandy land in North Carolina along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean.It was called Kill Devil Hill, near the town of Kitty Hawk. It hadthe right wind and open space. Best of all, it was private.
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In Nineteen-Hundred, the Wright brothers tested a glider thatcould carry a person. But neither the first or second glider theybuilt had the lifting power needed for real flight. Wilbur andOrville decided that what they had read about air pressure on curvedsurfaces was wrong. So they built a wind tunnel two meters long intheir bicycle store in Dayton, Ohio. They tested more thantwo-hundred designs of wings. These tests gave them the correctinformation about air pressure on curved surfaces. Now it waspossible for them to design a machine that could fly.
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The Wright brothers built a third glider. They took it to KittyHawk in the summer of Nineteen-Oh-Two. They made almost one-thousandflights with the glider. Some covered more than one-hundred-eightymeters. This glider proved that they had solved most of the problemsof balance in flight. By the autumn of Nineteen-Oh-Three, Wilbur andOrville had designed and built an airplane powered by a gasolineengine. The plane had wings twelve meters across. It weighed aboutthree-hundred-forty kilograms, including the pilot.
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The Wright brothers returned to Kitty Hawk. On DecemberSeventeen, Nineteen-Oh-Three, they made the world’s first flight ina machine that was heavier than air and powered by an engine.Orville flew the plane thirty-seven meters. He was in the air fortwelve seconds. The two brothers made three more flights that day.The longest was made by Wilbur. He flew two-hundred-sixty meters infifty-nine seconds. Four other men watched the Wright brothers’first flights. One of the men took pictures. Few newspapers,however, noted the event.
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Wilbur and Orville returned home to Ohio. They built morepowerful engines and flew better airplanes. But they success wasalmost unknown. Most people still did not believe flying waspossible. It was almost five years before the Wright brothers becamefamous. In Nineteen-Oh-Eight, Wilbur went to France. He gavedemonstration flights at heights of ninety meters. A French companyagreed to begin making the Wright brothers’ flying machine.
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Orville made successful flights in the United States at the timeWilbur was in France. One lasted an hour. Orville also madefifty-seven complete circles over a field at Fort Myer, Virginia.The United States War Department agreed to buy a Wright brothers’plane. Wilbur and Orville suddenly became world heroes. Newspaperswrote long stories about them. Crowds followed them. But they werenot seeking fame. They returned to Dayton where they continued toimprove their airplanes. They taught many others how to fly.
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Wilbur Wright died of typhoid fever in Nineteen-Twelve. OrvilleWright continued designing and inventing until he died many yearslater, in Nineteen-Forty-Eight.
Today, the Wright brothers’ first airplane is in the Air andSpace Museum in Washington, D.C. Visitors to the museum look at theWright brothers’ small plane with its cloth wings, wooden controlsand tiny engine. Then they see space vehicles and a rock collectedfrom the moon. This is striking evidence of the changes in the worldsince Wilbur and Orville Wright began the modern age of flight,one-hundred years ago.
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ANNCR:
This program was written by Marilyn Rice Christiano and producedby Paul Thompson. Your announcers were Sarah Long and RichKleinfeldt. I’m Faith Lapidus. Join us again next week for People inAmerica from VOA Special English.