We were lucky enough to grow up in an environment where there was always much encouragement to children to pursue intellectual interests; to investigate whatever aroused curiosity.
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"The machine is now a commercial success."
"The machine is capable of carrying a passenger."
"The machine is a triumph of human ingenuity."
"The course of the experiment was not always smooth. The machine would start all right, but the propelling power was not sufficient to overcome the resistance of the air."
"We are not content to walk upon the ground."
American aviation pioneers who achieved the first sustained powered controlled airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, NC, on December 17, 1903. Closely associated with Octave Chanute (their gliding mentor and aeronautical correspondent). For an intellectual contrast, see Samuel Pierpont Langley, Smithsonian Institution Secretary and government-funded aviation researcher — Langley's Aerodrome crashed twice into the Potomac in October-December 1903 with $50,000 of War Department funding; the Wright Brothers' bicycle-shop empiricism beat Langley's institutional Big Science by 9 days. The most-cited example in engineering history of empirical-tinkerer beating institution-funded credentialism.
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Being raised in a home where curiosity was welcomed and intellectual exploration was actively encouraged gave them the foundation for everything they achieved. It credits nurturing environment over formal schooling — the idea that children allowed to ask questions and chase their interests develop into independent thinkers. Curiosity itself is the engine of discovery, and the conditions set around a child determine whether that engine ever gets ignited.
Their father Bishop Milton Wright kept shelves of books and urged his children to read and experiment freely. Their mother Susan had rare mechanical aptitude and built household tools herself. Neither Orville nor Wilbur finished college, yet they mastered aerodynamics, engine design, and structural engineering through self-directed inquiry. Their Dayton bicycle shop became a working laboratory. The quote is a direct explanation of how two self-taught men from Ohio built the world's first successful powered airplane.
In the 1870s–1900s, formal higher education was inaccessible to most Americans, and compulsory schooling laws were still expanding state by state. The Industrial Revolution celebrated self-taught inventors — Edison, Tesla, Bell — as proof that ingenuity mattered more than credentials. Yet elite institutions still gatekept serious science. The Wright Brothers' flight in 1903 landed as a direct counter-argument: that a curious home, not a university diploma, was the true prerequisite for transforming the world.
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