One of these toys was a helicopter, or Cayley's Top, which would rise and flutter awhile in the air.
After several helicopters of their own, the brothers made original models of kites, and Orville, the younger, attained an exceptional skill in flying them.

Presently Orville and Wilbur were making their own bicycles and astonishing their neighbors by public appearances on a specially designed tandem.

The first accounts which they read of experiments with flying machines turned their inventive genius into the new field.

In particular the newspaper accounts at that time of Otto Lilienthal's exhibitions with his glider stirred their interest and set them on to search the libraries for literature on the subject of flying.
As they read of the work of Langley and others they concluded that the secret of flying could not be mastered theoretically in a laboratory; it must be learned in the air.

It struck these young men, trained by necessity to count pennies at their full value, as "wasteful extravagance" to mount delicate and costly machinery on wings which no one knew how to manage.