In 1903, Americans Orville and Wilbur Wright completed the world’s first successful controlled powered flight at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. This British Pathé film clip shows the Wright Brothers flying in 1908.
Transcript
On Thursday December the 17th 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 (sic); 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 Wrights had developed a lightweight 25-horsepower 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 flight 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.
*The catapult technique was not used for the flights of 17 December 1903. On that occasion their aeroplane left the ground under its own power. The longest of the four flights that day was a shade under a minute, at 59 seconds.
