MAN, HAVING NOT FLOWN YET, EVERYONE KNEW IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE:

In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, the Prussian army besieged Paris, Penaud's hometown. Bored and laid low by a bone disease, the 24-year-old distracted himself by improving on Cayley's plaything, substituting rubber bands for bone. Friends and acquaintances enjoyed watching the propeller hoist his toy-like contraption skyward. When peace returned, Penaud continued to fiddle with miniature flying machines. At the Gardens of the Tuileries in central Paris, he demonstrated a rubber band-powered "planophore." The unit had two bat-like wings with a span measuring 20 inches, a long, narrow body, and a vertical stabilizer. A propeller's spoon-shaped blades pushed the mechanism aloft. Members of the Société Aéronautique watched the thing rise and circle to a gentle landing--the first self-powered flying machine resembling what became the airplane. Penaud, who credited his yen for aviation with mitigating his bone condition, undertook a series of unsuccessful flying projects with beautiful and imaginative designs. In 1876 he took his own life.

Penaud's miniature helicopter design survived him, crossing the Atlantic to be marketed as a children's toy. In 1878 Milton Wright, a circuit-riding bishop of the United Brethren, a Protestant sect, bought one of these toys while traveling among congregations in Ohio. Milton and wife Susan lived in Dayton. They had five children; their youngest sons were Orville, seven, and Wilbur, 11. Arriving home for one of his brief stays, Milton summoned Orville and Wilbur and told his sons to watch. He tossed a Penaud helicopter their way. The toy rose to the room's ceiling, hovered, and descended. Fascinated, Wilbur and Orville tried to build larger versions. This first collaboration started a partnership that matured and deepened. Among the brothers' first discoveries was that any increase in size hampered the task of getting the model to fly. In time the Wrights' wind tunnel research showed to that if a flying machine's weight doubled, its motive power had to increase by a factor of eight to keep the machine aloft.

This reality, which had vexed Penaud and other would-be aviators, drove the Wrights to keep tinkering until, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, they got their wood-and-fabric biplane Wright Flyer aloft, pushed by a propeller connected to a 12-horsepower four-cylinder water-cooled internal combustion engine with an aluminum crankcase. Orville, who had won a coin toss, was at the controls. Press coverage enveloped the brothers, who explained that a toy had set them on their path. Both Wrights described Penaud's helicopter as a "bat"--Orville doing so when being deposed for a patent lawsuit. The Penaud helicopter became known as the "Wright Bat," and as such is still being sold. 

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