This Sunday will be Amos Root’s birthday. What an interesting man. He was the Elon Musk of his day. ~sasafrasbeefarm

In Remembrance of Amos Root –

• Birth: 9 DEC 1839 in Medina Township (Medina) State of Ohio
• Death: 30 APR 1923 in Medina (Medina) State of Ohio
• Burial: UNKNOWN Spring Grove Cemetery in Medina, Ohio

One Beekeeper, Two Wright Brothers

Source: One Beekeeper, Two Wright Brothers

One Beekeeper, Two Wright Brothers
Posted on September 14, 2016

Leave it to a beekeeper to make aviation history. An Ohio entrepreneur/beekeeper named Amos Root was, according to reports, the only person to actually witness the Wright brothers’ airplane flights in 1904 and 1905. And not just witness them, but write about them in a publication he founded called “Gleanings in Bee Culture.”

Root makes an appearance in David McCullough’s “The Wright Brothers” and also in an article on PBS’s Nova site. As the Nova site says, “almost as astonishing as the fact that a pair of bicycle shop owners invented the airplane” is that the first “accurate reporting on their earliest flights appeared” not in The New York Times or Scientific American, but in “an obscure journal for beekeepers.”

Root, a beekeeping hobbyist from his early twenties on, started a company in Medina, Ohio, that made beehives and beekeeping equipment. One of his best inventions was (improving ed.) removable frames so that a beekeeper could harvest honey without destroying the hive.

Root also started a candle-making company called Root Candles that is still in existence today. According to an article in The Cleveland Plain Dealer, the company, which sits next to Amos Root’s old homestead in Medina, makes 20 million home décor candles every year. The company’s president is a great-great grandson of Amos.

Read full article here: Source: One Beekeeper, Two Wright Brothers