Wright Cycle Company
The bicycle business of the Wright brothers, the Wright Cycle Company (originally the Wright Cycle Exchange) occupied five different locations in Dayton, Ohio. Orville and Wilbur Wright began their bicycle repair business in 1892, and soon added rentals and sales. In 1896 they began manufacturing and selling bicycles of their own design, the Van Cleve and St. Claire, named after their ancestors. They invented the self-oiling hub and the innovation of machining the crankarm and pedal on the left side of the bike with left-hand threads to prevent the pedal from coming unscrewed while cycling. They also ran a printing shop on the second-floor of their rented brick building at 22 South Williams St., Dayton, Ohio, the only extant building that housed a Wright bicycle shop on its original foundation and in its original location. The 22 South Williams Street building, where the Wrights worked from 1895 to 1897, is part of Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park and the National Aviation Heritage Area.
The Wrights used the profits from the Wright Cycle Company to finance their aviation experiments.
In 1901 they fitted a third bicycle wheel horizontally above the front wheel of one of their St. Claire bicycles and used the apparatus as a test platform to study airfoil design. From October to December that year, they conducted pioneering wind tunnel tests on the second floor of their bicycle shop at 1127 West Third St., the last location of their bicycle business.
In that building they designed and constructed their gliders and first airplane, the Wright Flyer. In 1937 the building was moved to Greenfield Village, Dearborn, Michigan by Henry Ford with the cooperation of Orville Wright.
Read more about Wright Cycle Company: Shop Locations
Famous quotes containing the words wright, cycle and/or company:
“Panting, begging I clutched childlike, clutched to the hot sides of
death.
Now I am dry bones and my face a stony skull staring in yellow
surprise at the sun. . . .”
—Richard Wright (1808–1860)
“The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Yet, hermit and stoic as he was, he was really fond of sympathy, and threw himself heartily and childlike into the company of young people whom he loved, and whom he delighted to entertain, as he only could, with the varied and endless anecdotes of his experiences by field and river: and he was always ready to lead a huckleberry-party or a search for chestnuts and grapes.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)