121 Years Ago Today…
At 10:35 AM on December 17th, 1903, on a sand dune in blustery Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the world was forever changed. Orville Wright launched off a metal rail into the sky and flew for 12 seconds, covering less than the distance of a 747’s wingspan. But this was a monuments flight - it was the first time a powered heavier than air craft had taken flight (the most widely accepted example, however it is contested).
Ironically, just 69 days earlier, the New York Times published a hit editorial “Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly,” wherein it was predicted that humans would not take powered flight for 1 to 10 million years.
Aviation has undeniably changed the world in a massive way. In 1903, the travel time between New York and London was 15 days on a steamship. 100 years later, one could step aboard a British Airways Concorde in New York, and less then 3 hours later, be in England. Aviation has enabled worldwide collaboration and communication on a scale perhaps only rivaled by the invention of the telegraph. The Wright Brothers, who were both dead by 1948, could not have possibly imagined how their flight on that fateful 1903 day had changed the course of humanity.