In 1903, two bicycle salesmen from Ohio made history on a sandy barrier island off the coast of North Carolina by carrying out the first successful airplane flight in history. After years of experimentation and flying gliders, Orville and Wilbur Wright literally catapulted themselves into the history books. There was just one little problem. Nobody gave a damn.
Soon after their historic first flight, Orville and Wilbur excitedly contacted the press to let them know about their amazing feat. The press was less than impressed. Most newspapers treated the brothers as though they were a pair of nut jobs. The few periodicals that didn’t just straight up ignore them, buried the story in the back of their papers with the articles about waltzing dogs and random perverts taking poops behind the livery stable. Sufficed to say, few if any people took notice. A little less than pleased with the public reaction to actually flying through the air, Orville and Wilbur staged a demonstration for the press four months later in a shit filled cow pasture. It did not go well. Poor winds and engine troubles kept their technological marvel on the ground, resulting in the press collectively deciding that reporting on two screw job bike hucksters was probably not the best use of their time.
Orville and Wilbur, surprisingly undeterred by this whole chain of events, spent the next year and a half improving their flying machine to the point that they could keep it in the air for nearly an hour and literally fly circles through the air. The only witnesses to these test flights were family members, several perplexed Ohio farmers, and one reporter who wrote about them in his beekeeping magazine. By the time the newspapers finally realized something really cool was going on, Orville and Wilbur had realized that their invention could probably make them a shit ton of money, and so became much less willing to talk about it. The two brothers spent the next two years trying to sell their idea to the American and various European governments, which proved difficult given that they were so afraid of people stealing their ideas that they wouldn't even show prospective buyers pictures of the damn thing. It wasn't until 1908, after reporters got the scoop by spying on the brothers, that the world at large finally found out that two bicycle mechanics were flying around like birds. This time the world lost its collective shit.
With the cat out of the bag, Wilbur and Orville won several contracts to supply airplanes to groups in the U.S. and France. It seemed like riches were about to be had, but that same year another inventor, a fella named Glen Curtiss, began selling his own airplane, which looked very similar to the Wright plane, only better. Wilbur and Orville sued Curtiss for patent infringement, but the lawsuit dragged on for eight years, stunting aviation development in the U.S. and leading to American plane designs falling far behind their European counterparts. The stress of it all eventually helped drive Wilbur to an early grave, well that and the typhoid fever. He died in 1912. Things eventually got so bad that the U.S. government finally forced a settlement between Orville Wright and Glen Curtiss in 1916. However, by then American airplanes were so far behind that the U.S. Army was forced to use French planes when the country entered World War I.
Following the end of the so-called Patent War, Orville quit building airplanes, perfectly content with just collecting money from others whose designs just barely resembled the ideas he and his brother had originally come up with. However, even in retirement Orville was unable to avoid getting into a feud. The Smithsonian claimed that the Wright Brothers didn’t invent the first airplane, but that the honor actually belonged to a man named Elwood Doherty, who just so happened to also be a member of the Smithsonian’s Board of Directors. As a middle finger to America’s largest museum, Orville gave the original Wright airplane to the London Science Museum in 1928. This feud went on until 1942, when the Smithsonian finally agreed that the Wright Brothers were the inventor of the airplane. As part of the agreement, the original Wright plane was to be given to the Smithsonian, but this did not occur until 1949 due to World War II just generally fucking things up. Orville died nine months before the plane finally returned to the United States.
Image: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wright_Flyer_III_above.jpg