Free The Bishop's Boys by Tom D. Crouch

top and bottom of a shaft that ran through the center of a small wooden bow. Holding the bow in one hand and turning the rotors with the other, the bowstring twisted around the shaft, flexing the bow. When released, the little craft bumped up against the ceiling, to the great delight of the assembled savants.
    It remained for Pénaud to substitute skeins of rubber for the cumbersome bow. Octave Chanute, a civil engineer who was to play an important role in the story of Wilbur and Orville Wright, regarded Alphonse Pénaud’s helicopter as “the best of its kind.” “These models, when built in varying proportions, would either rise like a dart to a height of some fifty ft., and then fall down, or sail obliquely in great circles, or, after rising some 20 or 25 ft., hover in the same spot for fifteen or twenty seconds, and sometimes as many as 26 seconds,which was a much longer flight than had ever been obtained before with screws.” 6
    Obviously, a single toy cannot shape the course of a life. Still, the little helicopter that Milton Wright brought home to Cedar Rapids in the fall of 1878 made a very big impression on his two youngest sons. Orville described the result in court testimony offered in 1912: “Our first interest [in flight] began when we were children. Father brought home to us a small toy actuated by a rubber spring which would lift itself into the air. We built a number of copies of this toy, which flew successfully…. But when we undertook to build the toy on a much larger scale it failed to work so well.” 7
    Orville’s first teacher remembered the incident as well. One day in 1878, Miss Ida Palmer, of the Jefferson School in Cedar Rapids, noticed the boy hunched over his desk fiddling with two pieces of wood. When she asked what he was doing, he explained that he was assembling the parts of a flying machine, a larger version of which might enable him to fly with his brother. It can only have been one of the small copies of the Pénaud model that the brothers had constructed. To her credit, Miss Palmer reprimanded Orville but did not confiscate the craft. 8
    A quarter of a century later young Milton Wright, Lorin’s son, reported that his uncles were still making helicopters “out of bamboo, paper, corks, and rubber bands and allowed us to run after them when they flew them.” 9 There can be no doubt that Orville regarded his father’s gift as a major event in his life. In 1929, at the height of his feud with officials of the Smithsonian Institution, Orville became incensed when a Smithsonian curator confused the Pénaud helicopter with the Dandrieux butterfly, another flying toy of the period. He wanted the details of the incident to be recorded accurately, and was determined that Pénaud, one of the two or three early aeronautical experimenters the brothers most admired, should receive full credit.
    The credit was all Milton’s—he knew a great deal about children in general and his sons in particular. The time he took out from a hectic schedule to select a stimulating gift had been very well spent.
    Both parents were great believers in formal and informal education alike. Their home was filled with books, and the children were encouraged to read at an early age. But Milton, himself an ex-teacher, had some strong ideas on education that occasionally conflicted with school policy. Miss Esther Wheeler, who taught several of the Wright children at the Seventh Street School in Dayton, had clearer memoriesof the father than his sons. “Bishop Wright did not believe in ten month school,” she recalled in 1909,
    and would tell his boys to take half a day off now and then. The Bishop and I have clashed over that proposition many times, but he was set in his ways and could not be won over by any sort of argument. He had much faith in his children and believed that they could keep up with their classes and miss a few days also. Whether he was right in allowing them to remain away, I will not try to