The first successful trip men made through the air was in a balloon. The next step was to make the balloon go to where they wanted it to go. This they did by adding motors and propellers. The result was the airship. But still, men were not satisfied. They wanted to build a machine that would fly through the air on wings. Such a machine is called an airplane. Many people in Europe and in America worked on this concept. The first inventors to build an airplane in which a man could fly were Wilbur and Orville Wright.
Wilbur was born in 1867 near Millville, Indiana. Orville Wright was born four years later. When the two brothers grew up, they built up a successful printing business and soon opened a bicycle shop. One day Wilbur read of a man in Germany who had fallen to his death while flying in a glider. A glider is really a kite that is large enough to carry a man. The idea of flying in a glider immediately interested Wilbur Wright. He told Orville about it. Then he began looking through the books in his father's library. One of the books which he found helpful was a book on birds. Man was imitating the birds when he was attempting to fly. The two brothers carefully watched and studied the flight of birds. They noticed how some birds could coast through the air for long periods of time.
They found that other people both in America and in Europe had been trying to fly. These people had built gliders too. There was one question no one had answered, that was how to balance the glider when it began to dip forward or backward or to one side. The Wright brothers, after long study, decided to build a pair of smaller wings before the wings of their glider. By turning these smaller wings up or down, the glider would not dip forward or backward too far. For four years, the Wright brothers studied and worked on this problem. At last, they were ready to build a glider of their own. In the fall of the year 1900, the Wright brothers built their first glider at Kitty Hawk and the test flight was a success.