les were unknown, and the new machines,
that could be ridden so fast along the highways, seemed a wonderful
invention. The Wright brothers had no money to buy a bicycle, so they
made one. You may laugh when you hear that they used a piece of old
gas pipe for the frame, but nevertheless they succeeded in their
undertaking and could ride as well on their home-made machine as their
friends did on expensive, high-grade ones. No doubt they had many long
rides and great sport with the bicycle they had built, but the Wright
brothers always found their greatest pleasure in making things rather
than in using them. Therefore, it did not seem strange to any one when
they said they wanted something better than a bicycle; but when it
became known that instead of riding rapidly over city streets and
country roads they wanted to fly through the air like birds, the
people were amazed and thought the two boys had lost their wits.

So to do this and buy materials with which to build their new machine,
they opened a bicycle repair shop. It was in the shed back of this
shop that they first made their models of air craft. They had no
wealthy friends to back them with money. They had no chance to go
abroad, where clever men were being urged by their governments to make
experiments with what the world called "flying machines." They were
not able to go to college or to any school where they could obtain
help in working out their plan, so they started in to study by
themselves what the German, French, and English inventors had to say
about the art of flying.

Seemingly, nothing discouraged them. Everywhere the newspapers and
magazines were poking fun at mad inventors who thought men would some
day soar through the air as birds do. There was a Professor Langley, a
man much older than the Wright brothers, who finished a machine in
1896. It flew perfectly, on the sixth day of May in that year. The
flight was made near Washington, D. C., along the Potomac river for
the distance of about three-quarters of a mile. He made another
successful flight in November. Then the United States Government urged
him to build a full-sized machine, capable of carrying a man. He
completed this machine in 1903 and attempted to launch it on the
seventh day of October in that year. An accident caused the machine to
fall into the Potomac. The aviator was thrown out and came near
drowning. Professor Langley tried to launch his machine again in
December and the same acc