A corner on the market in Dayton, patent pending of course!

Dayton, Ohio sits along I-75 a short hour's drive north of Cincinnati. While noted for the Wright Brothers and Paul Laurence Dunbar, Dayton at one point was the center of the nation when it came to technology and design. Today the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park (see right, click to enlarge) lets you step back in time on a corner where the spirit of innovation not just soared, but was started, inked and cashed too.

The Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical (web, map) lies about one mile west of downtown, and encompasses the historic Wright Brothers Cycle Complex building, the Wright-Dunbar Interpretive Center and the Aviation Trail Visitor Center & Musesum, at the corners of W. 3rd & S. Williams St. in Dayton (see left, click to enlarge). The park is dedicated primarily to the Wright Brothers with a healthy dose of Dunbar added, but there are other elements of Dayton's legacy included in the museum.

An replicated building that housed the fifth Wright Brothers Cycle Company (see left, click to enlarge) serves as a museum piece, and includes many displays of recreated bicycles produced by the Wright Brothers, including the legendary Van Cleve series (see below-right, click to enlarge). The Wright Brothers did not make bicycles, but rather assembled what they felt were the best pieces to form their own creations. Sadly no originals are left to display at the museum. The rear of the building shows a recreated workshop, where their flight engineering developed in their spare time. Henry Ford purchased, dissambled and re-assembled the original cycle shop and house that was a few blocks away at his Greenfield Village museum complex in Detroit.

A short walk across a nicely designed plaza places a visitor at the entrance of the Aviation Trail Visitor Center and Museum. This entrance was built onto the existing and renovated structure that originally housed the Wright Brother's second story print shop and the family's ground level general store. Design elements entice the visitor with enticing architecture and massive graphics of the Wrights and Dunbar (see right, click to enlarge).

An oversize billboard on the building southern facing wall graces the plaza (see right, click to enlarge) and was reproduced from a local newspaper touting the brothers' return in the early 1900's from a European business trip. The Wrights were manipulative entrepreneurs and after successfully mastering powered flight, shut down their test flights to keep their designs private. They then embarked on visits to here and abroad looking to sell their designs for military use. Dayton threw a massive celebration upon return home after one of these junkets.

The two-story museum is unique in that several rooms are recreated as they were a century ago. The general store is laid out in one room as it was then. Lost to the casual visitor is a fanciful and antique cash register amid the shelves of goods (see right, click to enlarge). It was in Dayton where the cash register was born and improved, first by James Ritty and John Birch in 1883, then by John Patterson later, who founded the National Cash Register company -- today known simply as NCR.

Unknown to many, Dayton had, and still claims to have, more patents per capita than any other place on the planet. There are over 100 patents laying claim to Dayton, Ohio on file with the government. Charles Kettering added power components to the cash register, but later is better known for letting the ladies get a chance behind the wheel of the horseless carriage. It was Kettering's idea to add an electric starter to an automobile, removing the labor-intensive hand-cranking to start the engine.

Between the Wrights and Kettering, these Dayton men engendered a gender revolution. Bicycles and automobiles allowed the ladies to move about as well, and bicycle trends signaled a change in fashion trends for long skirts and bicycles are not compatible. Bloomers became a new fashion style for Victorian ladies.

While Paul Laurence Dunbar's contribution to history lay principally in his poetry and literature, his connection to the Wright Brothers is sometimes also lost to history. Unfortunately young people tend to learn history in compartmentalized themes and authors and poets do not typically show up in the same chapter as technological advancements at the same time. Friends through attending classes at Dayton Central High, the Wright Brothers second floor print shop was where Dunbar self-published his own newspaper, The Tattler (see right, click to enlarge). Oddly the University of Dayton's Dunbar website is silent on the relationship between he and the Wrights.

Orrville and Paul had become best friends and shared political similar political ideals. One of the second floor rooms is devoted solely to Dunbar. The remainder of the second floor museum pays homage to the timeline of flight, including a nice display where one do a photo-op appearing as though parachuting from the sky.

A small theater on the ground floor runs a 30-minute biography on the Wright Brothers that tells more of the story of powered flight than people tend to know. Another flaw in the teaching of history is that when an accomplishment is reached and shared, the story ends in favor of the next event in history. There was much more to the Wright's story following Kittyhawk's first flight and it was centered in Dayton.

The final element to the park is a good 20 minute drive northeast, and the location where the Wrights did their test flights of the powered Wright Flyer. Today Huffman Prairie Field is encircled by Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, but access to the historic landmark does not require entering the base. Bounded by a series of large white flags, as they were over 100 years ago, the field contains a recreated shed and catapult tower and track (see right, click to enlarge). The lack of an ocean breeze hindered getting their first planes airborn and the ingenuity of a catapult -- not far removed from how aircraft are launched from aircraft carriers today -- soon followed.

Dayton's place in history is rooted in flight, but it is the innovation of its citizens that literally -- and metaphorically -- cornered the market on technology.

J.