In Orville's own words:



http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0486...=1#reader-page

"We could not understand that there was anything about a bird that
would enable it to fly that could not be built on a lager scale
and used by man."

"In 1896 we read in the daily papers, or in some of the
magazines, of the experiments of Otto Lilienthal, who was making
some gliding flights from the top of a small hill in Germany. His
death a few months later while making a glide off a hill increased
our interest in the subject, and we began looking for books
pertaining to flight."


And thus it began...