Wilbur and Orville Wright were two brothers from the heartland of America with a vision as sweeping as the sky and a practicality as down-to-earth as the Wright Cycle Co., the bicycle company taht the two brothers had founded in 1892 in Dayton, Ohio. The wright brothers did not own the only bicycle shop at the turn of the century but were the only one with wheels as well as wings being built. The two brothers had been interested by flight from an early age. In 1878 their father, a bishop in the Churh of the United Brethren in Christ, gave them a a toy plane made of cork and bamboo. Its body was made of paper and was powered by rubber bands. The toy was soon broken but the memory of it stayed in their minds. Wilbur had been reading every book and paper he could find about human flight by the mid-1890's. Four years before the flight at Kitty Hawk the brothers had built a scaled down unpioleted version of the craft. This craft had a wing span of 5 ft., and was made of wood wire and cloth. After testing out this version of the aircraft Wilbur was sure it was possible to take a full sized version and make it fly and hold a man at the same time. While the bicycle business payed the bills and was what made a living for the brothers a living it was building a plane that had inspired them. For many years Wilbur said he was "afflicted with the belief that flight is possible". The reallity of the dream was a lonely quest for the brothers in their workroom behind the bike shop, dreaming to defy gravity and conquer the wind. That obsessive belief is a force that drives you to bet everything on a fragile wing or new idea. It was a force that led the brothers to single-handedly, invent each of the tools they needed to make the dream come true. When published data about the wind came to be untrue, the Wright brothers did their own experimentsto figure out what they needed to know in order to get the air craft to lift off the ground. They were the first to discover the architechtural secrets of flight and they figured out how to move the vehicle freely, not just across land, but up and down on a cushion of air. The brothers used data from past experiments to design effective airplane props. When they found out that a light weight gas powered engine did ot exsist, they designed and built there own.