Comment by leobg

It was also two teenagers who, some 50 years earlier, came up with the idea of flying machines and the aerodynamics of wings in the first place:

The brothers Otto and Gustav Lilienthal were watching the storks take flight in the meadows of Mecklenburg in the 1850s. And it made them think, “We could do that, too, if we only had wings like that”.

Of course, Otto died in a crash of one of his motorless flying machines in 1891, I believe. But the Wright brothers saw the eulogy in the paper… and the rest is history.