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WARREN -- The first airplane was flown in Kittyhawk, North Carolina, but it was actually created in Dayton, Ohio, where the Wright Brothers gathered data and conducted experiments for their flying machine.
The inventors of the original motorized airplane, Wilbur and Orville Wright, grew up and lived their adult lives in Dayton. During his Thursday talk, "The Bishop's Kids: The Wright Family and the Birth of Flight" at the Warren-Trumbull County Public Library, Tom Crouch, curator emeritus of the aeronautics division at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, discussed the Wright family and their journey to achieving a manned flight.
"The Wrights grew up at number seven Hawthorne Street on the west side of Dayton. A typical middle class, Midwestern neighborhood," Crouch said.
Today, their home is no longer in Dayton.
"Henry Ford purchased the house in the 1930s and moved it to Greenfield Village," Crouch said.
The open-air historical museum is now located in Dearborn, Michigan.
Wright, an American bishop of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, was an early influence on his sons' invention.
"Milton Wright was bishop of the west coast for a time but mostly Indiana and Ohio. He traveled a lot particularly in the years he was in charge of California, Washington and Oregon. He was gone for long periods of time but he was a good father. He would always come home with presents for the kids. One toy that he gave Wilbur and Orville was a helicopter with the propeller on top," Crouch said.
They broke the helicopter on the first day of having it. Instead of playing with something else, they recreated the toy and learned many lessons to help them in flight.
"For example, if you built it much larger than the original toy, the thing wouldn't fly because weight was the essential thing that you had to keep in mind," Crouch said.
The Wright brothers continued to build this toy for their nieces and nephews throughout their lives.
Their mother, even though she died over a decade prior to her sons' successful engine powered flight, still had some influence on their invention.
"Susan Wright was really handy. She was good with her hands. She made the kids' toys when they were young. If something in the house needed fixing, Susan was the one who did it," Crouch said.
The children learned to use tools from their mother. This knowledge helped them with their experiments and data collection.
"When the boys were growing up, their father was the head of the church publishing operation," he said.
Years later, Orville opened a print shop in Dayton, where Wilbur also worked.
At the time when bicycles became a craze across the country, Orville and Wilbur opened a bicycle repair shop in Dayton and later designed and sold their own bicycles. "Orville won bicycle races," Crouch said.
Their businesses gave them access to a workshop and tools to use for their aviation experiments. In Dayton, they built their first wind tunnel.
During his talk, Crouch discussed the process that the Wright brothers took from gliders to their first official manned flight of a gasoline powered airplane on Dec. 17, 1903.
"Orville and Wilbur flipped a coin and Orville flew the first successful flight of 12 seconds," Crouch said.
Wilbur Wright flew most of the glider flights.
They chose the small town of Kittyhawk, North Carolina, because of the windiness of the area and the soft beaches.
"Wilbur wrote to the weather bureau for locations with a lot of wind," Crouch said.
The other locations were near large cities and the Wrights were not used to such metropolises as Chicago or Cleveland.
The Wright family also included oldest son, Ruechlin; second son, Lorin, a bookkeeper who was involved with the Wright family businesses; twins, Otis and Ida, who died at birth; and Katherine, who ran the bicycle business while her brothers were in North Carolina experimenting with manned flight. When the telegram came announcing the brothers' achievement of their first flight, Lorin went to the local papers with the news.
Crouch discussed the fame the brothers achieved, flying in Europe, acquiring a patent and the lawsuits they fought in court against people who challenged their first flight status.
The Wrights did not enter the race to achieve a manned air flight for fame, money or to be first, but for a more personal purpose.
"The real reason that kept them going was their background in bicycles and the excitement and thrill of solving a huge technical problem that no one else had been able to do. They were engineering geniuses," Crouch said.
This was one of numerous programs related to aviation happening in October during Trumbull County Reads 2026. This year's selection is "To Slip the Bonds of Earth," by Amanda Flowers. The mystery book features Katherine Wright as the main character. Her brothers, Lorin, Wilbur and Orville, and her father are secondary characters.