It's also worth reading about Sir George Cayley, Samuel Pierpont Langley, and Gustave Whitehead -- all aviation pioneers with some degree of success in the pre-Wright era.
One of the main accomplishments of the Wright Brothers was that they continued to improve on those flights over the next several years, putting flight in the public eye -- their flights in 1908 and 1909 catapulted flight from "something a few people have claimed, but there's still a lot of skepticism" to "something everyone realized was really possible".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse
It's also worth reading about Sir George Cayley, Samuel Pierpont Langley, and Gustave Whitehead -- all aviation pioneers with some degree of success in the pre-Wright era.
One of the main accomplishments of the Wright Brothers was that they continued to improve on those flights over the next several years, putting flight in the public eye -- their flights in 1908 and 1909 catapulted flight from "something a few people have claimed, but there's still a lot of skepticism" to "something everyone realized was really possible".