13A- Reading Reflection #1

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

A surprising fact i did not know about the Wright Brothers was that they had successfully grew a bicycle business while growing up and had been entrepreneurs from the start. In a time that bicycles were deemed unsafe, they opened their own bike shop and started small doing repairs and maintenance to a full time store at which they were making thousands of dollars a year in profit. The fact that I admire about the Wright Brothers the most was their ability to keep going after numerous failures. They went to Kitty Hawk numerous times and failed miserably and had to venture all the way back to Dayton to continue their work on their machine and to overwatch their bike store. A small fact that I least admire was that one of Wilbur's friend's grew up to be a serial killer. That caught my eye. I admire more than I do not about the Wright Brothers as they put themselves in danger multiple times but still proceeded as they knew that they were on to something special. Yes,
the Wright Brothers encountered adversity the whole time. Most said that the idea of flying was impossible and that no human ever could fly. They took that and used it as fuel as they successfully eventually flew after numerous bad instances. They took advice from their surroundings and did a lot more studying and observing than I first imagined. They took advice from everything, from the weight and size it should be, to the thought of equilibrium that a bird uses to fly carelessly through the sky. Before reading this book, I thought that the two just went out and performed numerous tests but I realized reading the book that they put a lot more time and effort into it than I thought. It was truly a long process off failures that made them realize what it would take to really fly.

I noticed that both of the brothers had very good entrepreneur skills from a young age. From starting their bike store when bikes were deemed unsafe because they knew something everyone else didn't to flying when no one thought it was possible. Also, they never gave up when they could easily as have. They spent numerous time at the beach and back in Dayton perfecting their design and it ultimately paid off. Also, not being college grads they were really smart. They took their surroundings and implemented that into their learnings.

One part of the reason that was confusing to me was that McCullough talked about how others were trying to complete flight as the Wright Brothers were too and apparently had much more financial capital than the Wright Brothers did. My misunderstanding is how the Wright Brothers obtained flight  over the scientists with financial assistance.

If I was able to ask two questions to the Wright Brothers, they would be how they feel about changing the world and being the pioneers of flight as well well as asking Wilbur specifically how he didn't catch that his childhood friend would grow up to be one of the worst serial killers in Dayton? It said that he knocked Wilbur's teeth out growing up playing hockey and then did other drug and then related things. How could he not know that that kid would grow up to do extremely bad things?