The bicycle business paid their bills, and their dream fuelled their work.
The brothers plotted to conquer the skies in a room behind their bicycle shop. Such was their perseverance that when they found published aeronautical data to be unreliable, they built their own wind tunnel to test airfoils and measure empirically how to lift a flying machine into the sky.
In fact, they were the first to discover, among many other things, that a long, narrow wing shape was the ideal for flying.
Four F15 jets fly over the Wright Brothers Memorial on December 16.
Photographs: Alex Wong/Getty Images