Technology · 1903
The Wright brothers' first powered flight
Kill Devil Hills, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina (USA)
On 17 December 1903, on the windy sand dunes of Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright piloted the Wright Flyer, a fabric-covered biplane with a 12-horsepower petrol engine that he and his brother Wilbur, bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio, had built with their mechanic Charles Taylor. The first flight lasted 12 seconds and covered 37 m (120 ft); the fourth and last flight of the day, with Wilbur at the controls, covered 260 m (852 ft) in 59 seconds.
It was the first sustained, controlled flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft with a person aboard.
Why it mattered
Within a lifetime aircraft shrank the world: Alcock and Brown flew the Atlantic in 1919, a jet aircraft flew in 1939, and humans landed on the Moon 66 years after Kitty Hawk. Air travel became a mass form of transport, with airlines carrying 4.1 billion passengers in 2017, and by the start of the First World War aircraft were already being used for reconnaissance and attacks on the ground.
Elsewhere
The Wrights' key breakthrough was not the engine but control: they solved how to steer and balance an aircraft in the air with "wing warping" and a movable rudder and elevator, after testing three full-sized gliders from 1900. The original 1903 Flyer hangs in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
Related
- The world in 1900: Dawn of a New Century chapter
- Battle of Adwa previous moment · 1896
- World War I next moment · 1914–1918