HOW HE SEES IT Dreams can come true

By JAY AMBROSE
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
There was something in the air that led the Wright brothers to literally put something in the air, the first piloted, laterally controlled, powered plane to sustain flight in the history of human beings trying again and again to do this sort of thing.
The something-in-the-air that fostered the achievement was an energized, frontier-fashioned American culture that breathed optimism that just about anything could be done, that prized inventiveness and that bred a practical-minded mechanical aptitude.
The culture at the turn of the last century found a particular home in Dayton, Ohio, where, a journalist tells us, there were more patent recipients than anyplace else in the country. You could also find Orville and Wilbur Wright there, a couple of bachelors running a bicycle shop and dreaming a dream, but not just dreaming it. They were doing something about it in a point-by-point, analytical way.
Historians say it was their approach of breaking the problem of flight down into its constituent parts and then figuring out an answer for each separate issue that gave the Wright brothers an advantage over competitors who would slap something promising together and trot it out for testing in the false hope that a mighty crash did not await.
It was 100 years ago today that the Wright brothers made their famous flight near Kitty Hawk, N.C., and we all know what has followed: all sorts of adventures, including Charles Lindbergh's solo, trans-Atlantic flight; constant improvements in design; the development of an aeronautics industry; the use of aircraft in warfare; rockets to the moon and shuttles to satellites, and commercial flights on which the modern world depends for much of its long-distance coming and going.
Range of ideas
The future? Reported speculation is no more earthbound than were the Wright brothers, the ideas ranging from backpack flying instruments for the commuter who would just as soon zip over traffic jams, thank you, to commercial planes so fast that flight time could be reduced to a seventh of what it is now.
Thanks to the inventiveness of people such as the Wright brothers, and to their courage -- Orville was critically injured once when a plane went down -- we can all have some sense of what a young pilot meant in 1941 when he wrote, "Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth / And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings."
Let the inventiveness continue.