Building airplanes with bike-shop hustle

The Wright brothers and those other early aviation pioneers just kill me - their original Flyer from 1903 was a biplane with two wings stacked on top of each other, which honestly already looks wild compared to the stuff we see today. People always confuse it with the Gerhardt Cycloplane, which was a totally different contraption with way more wings, but the Wrights kept it pretty simple. Crazy to remember these guys were just running a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, before deciding to piece together an airplane out of wood and fabric, not even close to the fiberglass and high-tech stuff we use now. I can’t help but imagine all the failed, scrapped prototypes lying around their workshop - who knows what strange flying machines never even left the ground. Mad respect for how Orville and Wilbur just kept trying out new ideas until something actually got off the ground.