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.
How the World Has Changed
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.
I’d argue that aviation started millennia before 1903. Since recorded history began, people have thought about flight. It’s in Greek Fables, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, and in most major religious texts (Bible, the Torah, etc). The first things humans put in the sky start about 2,000 years in China, where people started flying silk and bamboo kites. People experimented with gliders for centuries until they got it right (those who got it wrong either didn’t make it off the ground or fell to a pretty nasty demise).
The oldest remaining flying device is L’Intrépide, a hydrogen balloon of the compagnie d’aérostiers, a French intelligence unit, the first military to ever use aeronautical technology for spying and warfare.
