On Thursday, December the seventeenth, 1903, news came clattering across the world's wire
machines that two brothers from Dayton in Ohio had flown a curious looking air machine
over the beach at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina....for more than a minute.
And if anyone was sceptical about the claim, these pictures were to prove it was true.
For several years at the turn of the century, dozens of groups in Europe and America had
been trying to get a flying machine to work.
But defying gravity wasn't proving easy.
Nevertheless, Wilbur and Orville Wright, after a long period of trial and error, found a
formula that seemed to work.
The problem they, and everyone else, had faced was how to generate enough power to get the
machine off the ground and to keep it going, once it was up, in a stable and steady flight.
The Wright's had developed a lightweight twenty five horse power engine which provided a much
higher power to weight ratio than anything that had gone before.
With this, and a little help on the launch site from a heavy lead weight, they were airborne,
and away.
This dramatically successful series of flights was the result of several years of secret
work by the Wrights, using models in a wind tunnel near their home.
Only the most far-sighted and enthusiastic believed at the time that what the brothers
were doing would have any lasting significance.
But what they'd just witnessed was the start of a transport revolution.
From now on the world was to become, in many ways, a much smaller place.