December 2003

First Flight

Fifty-nine seconds that changed history

by Karen Haywood Queen

A century ago, just outside Hampton Roads on the windy sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, two self-taught engineers changed history as one lay prone on an airplane and flew for less than a minute and fewer than 1,000 feet.

True, others who were working on the same idea laid claim to the title Father of Aviation. But don’t let anyone tell you different: bicycle mechanics Wilbur and Orville Wright deserve the honor for their 59-second, 852-foot controlled flight of a heavier-than-air machine on Dec. 17, 1903.

“The Wright brothers are the inventors of the airplane in a much more serious way than Thomas Edison was the inventor of the light bulb and Alexander Bell was the inventor of the telephone,” says Tom Crouch, senior curator, aeronautics, at the National Air and Space Museum.

Other inventors came up with their own light bulbs and telephone devices at nearly the same time as Edison and Bell, Crouch says.

“But the Wright brothers had to take a much bigger leap into the unknown,” he says. “They had to solve enormous problems. They really were a pair of intuitive engineers. They had never spent a day in a college classroom. But they knew... aerodynamics. They could calculate the performance of their machine from the wings to the propeller to everything.

For the rest of this story, you can order the December 2003 issue of Hampton Roads Monthly magazine.