Captain Bill yawned and stretched. “Not much to do on a day like this. I’m mighty anxious to get out to the airport as soon as it clears up. What’ll we do?” Bob had an idea. “Couldn’t we sort of sneak one over on Pat?” he said. “Couldn’t we have a story, one not in the contest, now? It wouldn’t count, really, and it would give us a little rehearsal before Pat gets here.” “Who’s going to tell this story?” asked Captain Bill, looking just a bit suspiciously at his nephew. Bob grinned. “Well, I thought that maybe you would. Seeing that you’re the best story-teller anyway.” “Go long with your blarney. But I guess I will tell you one. It will be a sort of prologue to the rest of our stories. It’s about the very first flyers and the very first famous flight.” “The Wrights?” asked Hal. “The Wrights,” said the Captain. “Wilbur and Orville, and their first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.” CHAPTER III—The Wright Brothers The Captain had first to fill his pipe, and stretch his legs before he began his story. “Of course,” he said, “we can’t really say that the Wrights were the first men to fly, or to build a machine that would fly. Even in the middle ages Leonardo da Vinci drew up plans for a flying machine. Just before the Wright’s experiment Langley had stayed up in the air in a machine invented and built by himself. If he had not died at so unfortunate a period in his experimental life, perhaps he might have been the inventor of the airplane. “The Wrights invented the airplane in the same degree that Thomas Edison invented the electric light. Men had experimented with both inventions for many years. But it took the genius of the Wrights, the genius of an Edison to bring together these experiments, to think through logically just wherein they were right and where they were wrong, and to add the brilliant deductions that brought their experiments to a practical and successful end. Edison’s discovery was dependent upon the finding of the proper filament for his bulb; the Wrights’ success hinged upon their discovery of the warped wing, which gave them control over their plane. “The fact that the Wrights were not the first to fly does not detract from the thing that they actually did. At the time that they were making their first flying machine, any man who tampered with the subject of flying through the air was looked upon as crazy. And this was not more than a quarter of a century ago. Seems funny, doesn’t it? But they were not to be discouraged. They knew that they were right, and they went ahead. They had many set-backs. Their planes were wrecked. What did they do? They just built them over again, and were glad that they had learned of some new defect that they could re-design and correct.