Time Machine: The birth of flight

Finley P. Dunne, a Chicago writer transplanted to New York, wrote in the American Magazine in 1909, 'I doubt if the Wright brothers would ever have made a flying machine if it had not been for the sympathy and good sense of both their father and mother.

'It is possible that the memory of a flying toy which their father brought home to them from New York in childhood and the recollection of the great kites which they built and flew all through boyhood may have had a share in attracting them to the subject.”

The cork, bamboo and paper toy was a 'helicoptere,” made by French experimenter Alphonse Penaud, who created several kinds of flying toys.

Milton Wright moved his family to Cedar Rapids when he was elected bishop of the West Mississippi district of the United Brethren Church.

'Father moved to Cedar Rapids in 1878, when I was just a few months short of seven years of age. I am not certain whether there was a United Brethren congregation at that time. But I remember that soon after our coming to Cedar Rapids, Rev. M.R. Drury became pastor, and that church services and Sunday school where held in a hall on the second floor of a building, the first floor of which was occupied by the post office. That was down near the river in the neighborhood of Iowa (First) Avenue, ” Orville Wright wrote in a letter in October 1939.

Orville remembered the church building was started in 1878 at the corner of Seventh Street and Fourth Avenue SE and that he and his brother were called on to help sod the church yard.

Orville said that his family resided at the corner of Tenth Street and First Avenue and later lived in a house near the high school. Washington High School faced Greene Square between Fourth and Fifth avenues.

Bishop Wright traveled often to other congregations. In April 1881, Orville sent his father a post card that revealed his budding interest in science. Soon after, the Wright family moved to Richmond, Ind.

By 1911, a Gazette story called Orville and Wilbur 'world famous airmen,” the first to make a successful flight with a biplane. E.L. Ackerman, advertising manager for the Cedar Rapids Exposition that was scheduled to feature a Wright Company airman in October that year, said that 'because of modesty of the Wrights, Cedar Rapids has known no more than that the Wrights went to school in this city.”

He talked to Orville in Chicago in August. Orville told him that one day his father came home with a toy that delighted the Wright kids. They called the toy a 'bat” because they thought it resembled the little animals that circled under the street lamps at night.

They immediately set the toy to flying, but between its fragility and successive use, it broke. The future airmen spent hours examining and dissecting the toy.

The fascination with flight remained with them until they created the aircraft that flew at Kitty Hawk, N.C., and made history.

The Wrights were very modest, according to Ackerman and were very private.

Orville told Ackerman that he would probably come to Cedar Rapids, but not during the exposition. The brothers were not fond of show and noise. He said he remembered several people from when he lived in Cedar Rapids, and would remember more, but his memory was impaired from an airship accident that occurred in Fort Myer, Va., in 1908.

Whether the Wright brothers made it to Cedar Rapids is not known. Wilbur died in May 1912 of typhoid fever. Orville survived Wilbur by 36 years.