My brother Wilbur and i invented the airplane and i predicted that the airplane would make war so terrible that i didn't believe any country will again care to start a war but rather than putting an end to war as i thought, i lived just long enough to see one of my flying inventions drop an atomic bomb and vapourise an entire Japanese City so that didn't go quite as i thought.Someone who doesn't get any credit is my fellow American Octave Chanute who had been tinkering with flying machines for years and published the very first history of aviation before anyone had actually taken flight and he even designed a plane which some students later reconstructed and flew it for over a minute which means that he probably designed the world's first functioning airplane, four years before we flew ours.
We contacted him for advice as we designed our own machine and modeled our glider after his designs and to thank him we patented the designs as our own and stopped writing to him. Octave who?
We got our plane airborne for 12 seconds, 10 feet above the ground for 120ft with me flying the plane while Wilbur stayed on the ground watching, we both became famous but not straight away, the local newspaper didn't even bother writing about it.
We started out with a bicycle repair shop and even designed and sold our own bike which allowed us to finance the plane but after we proved we had the first flying machine, we quite soon had another first when i crashed and killed my passenger, the first airplane fatality.
We spent the years after suing companies who tried to copy our design and ignoring Octave what-his-name but my last flight was in 1944 on a Lockheed Constellation which the pilot made a point of sarcastically mentioning had a wingspan of 126ft, longer than the distance of my first flight not that i cared, i was famous, he wasn't but most importantly, neither was Octave whats-his-face.
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