The Wright Brothers: A Non-fictional Hero's Journey

In Campbell’s A Hero With A Thousand Faces, the author explains all seventeen steps of the hero’s journey, and how many fictional characters achieves some of them throughout a transforming moment of their lives. However, he never spoke of the Journey in the non-fictional world. After reading and analyzing the life the Wright Brother’s I concluded that they also went through the same steps while inventing the first aeroplane, and that their invention shaped our culture for the better. During Wilbur Wright’s childhood, he expressed an unusual interest in human flight through playing with models of aircrafts that his father brought home, and studying the bird’s flight outside with his equally as interested brother, Orville Wright. But it was not until Orville was struck with a deadly illness that had no known cure that “Wilbur had begun reading about a German glider… aloud to Orville” which had interested them so much that they began attempting their own aircraft once Orville had made a full recovery on top of managing their own bicycle shop (McCullough 28). It was at this point, when they began to put more of their time

While the brothers were discovering and how to make a plane glide and ultimately how to make it fly, they kept returning to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina to test their ideas once the constructed them in the back of their bicycle shop. Over the course of four years the encountered “violent storms, accidents, disappointment, public indifference, and clouds of mosquitoes” and many other setbacks that would have shoken other inquiring pioneers (McCullough 106). Nevertheless, the challenges both nature and man-made never stood a chance to the Wright Brother’s endurant nature. Their determination and ability to discover the problem and attend to it quickly were some of the reasons they got farther than other