How America Started

Learn How America Conquers the Air!

If you ask any student, even in elementary school, why the town of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, is significant to American history, they will know the answer immediately. They will know that this was the place where Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first working airplane and proved that man could fly.

Today, with thousands of airplanes taking to the sky at any given moment and the experience of flying high above the Earth as common as riding a bicycle, the idea of a world where men did not fly seems as distant as the ancient Romans.

But we need to travel back in time to the days before the Wright brothers made their phenomenal discovery and invented the first aircraft. At that time, it was firmly believed that man would never fly like a bird and was meant to remain a terrestrial being. We can be grateful that the Wright brothers did not hold this belief.

The date of that first successful flight was December 17, 1903. It was on that fateful day that Orville and Wilbur successfully flew the first controlled, powered, heavier-than-air airplane.

This breakthrough ranks as one of the greatest inventions in American history, and indeed, one of the greatest inventions of all time. Man had been dreaming of flying as far back as we have primitive drawings illustrating that dream.