her. Langley, at that time
sixty-nine years of age, took this defeat so keenly to heart that it
hastened his death, which occurred three years later. "Failure in the
aerodrome itself," he wrote, "or its engines there has been none; and
it is believed that it is at the moment of success, and when the
engineering problems have been solved, that a lack of means has
prevented a continuance of the work."

It was truly "at the moment of success" that Langley's work was stopped.
On December 17, 1903, the Wright brothers made the first successful
experiment in which a machine carrying a man rose by its own power,
flew naturally and at even speed, and descended without damage. These
brothers, Wilbur and Orville, who at last opened the long besieged lanes
of the air, were born in Dayton, Ohio. Their father, a clergyman and
later a bishop, spent his leisure in scientific reading and in the
invention of a typewriter which, however, he never perfected. He
inspired an interest in scientific principles in his boys' minds by
giving them toys which would stimulate their curiosity. One of these
toys was a helicopter, or Cayley's Top, which would rise and flutter
awhile in the air.

After several helicopters of their own, the brothers made original
models of kites, and Orville, the younger, attained an exceptional
skill in flying them. Presently Orville and Wilbur were making their
own bicycles and astonishing their neighbors by public appearances on
a specially designed tandem. The first accounts which they read of
experiments with flying machines turned their inventive genius into the
new field. In particular the newspaper accounts at that time of Otto
Lilienthal's exhibitions with his glider stirred their interest and set
them on to search the libraries for literature on the subject of flying.
As they read of the work of Langley and others they concluded that the
secret of flying could not be mastered theoretically in a laboratory;
it must be learned in the air. It struck these young men, trained
by necessity to count pennies at their full value, as "wasteful
extravagance" to mount delicate and costly machinery on wings which no
one knew how to manage. They turned from the records of other inventors'
models to study the one perfect model, the bird. Said Wilbur Wright,
speaking before the Society of Western Engineers, at Chicago:

"The bird's wings are undoubtedly very well designed indeed, but it is
not any extraordinary efficienc