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Orville's Flying Toy - Excerpt from "How Ohio Helped Invent the World"
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Although well known for inventing the airplane with his brother, Wilbur, Orville Wright also had a lighter side. Nearly twenty years after the historic event at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Wright would file an application at the U.S. Patent office for another type of flying machine.
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The toy was made to project a doll into the air, where it would then somersault once,before landing a distance away onto a swinging trapeze bar.
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After Wright was granted patent #1,523,989 on January 20, 1925 the toy was assigned to the Miami Wood Specialty Company in Dayton, Ohio. Although it didn’t prove as successful as Orville and Wilbur’s full-size machine, it went on to become a favorite toy to
many children.
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The idea that Orville Wright would invent a flying toy should come as no surprise. It was another toy that inspired the Wright Brother’s interest in flying.
“Our first interest began when we were children”, claims Orville. “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. By ‘we’ I refer to my brother Wilbur and myself. But when we undertook to build the toy on a much larger scale it failed to work so well. The reason was not understood by us at the time, so we finally abandoned the experiments."
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Please click on the HOME button to get information on how to order Curt Dalton's latest book, "How Ohio Helped Invent the World".
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 daytondalton@prodigy.net
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