Orville and
Wilbur Wright are credited with in December 1903 launching the first aircraft off the ground on the beach of
Kitty Hawk,
North Carolina.
It is not so widely known that their uncle, a
protestant bishop, (their father was one, too, by the way) only a short time before, in a statement that swept
America, had publicly announced that "of course" man would never fly.
Some other interesting
factoids:
- The Wright brothers were actually from Dayton, Ohio, where they ran a bicycle shop. Their first plane was called the "Wright Flyer", named, bizarrely enough, after one of their bicycles.
- During their final 84 days of constant work at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk to get their plane working, they mostly lived off beans.
- Neither of the Wright bothers was married.
- They never called their invention "airplane", they called it "flying machine"
- Dayton, the brother's hometown, showed so little interest in their invention that it only gave them a parade 6 years after the event.
- Early pilots were often called "aeronauts", or "aviators", with the "a" pronounced short like in "navigator".