Twelve Seconds Over Kill Devil Hills

On the morning of December seventeenth, nineteen oh three, the temperature at Kitty Hawk on the North Carolina Outer Banks was barely above freezing. Rain puddles had iced over overnight. Wind off the Atlantic was blowing at more than twenty miles per hour.

Two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, Orville and Wilbur Wright, had been camped in the dunes since September, working on a strange contraption of spruce and muslin and bicycle wire. At ten thirty-five in the morning, Orville stretched out face-down on the lower wing, took the controls, and released the restraining wire. The Flyer rolled down a launching rail and lifted into the air.

It flew for twelve seconds, covering one hundred twenty feet. The wind was so strong that the ground speed was barely faster than a man walking. But it was flight: controlled, sustained, engine-powered, heavier than air.

They flew four times that day. By the fourth flight, Wilbur covered eight hundred fifty-two feet in fifty-nine seconds. A gust caught the Flyer on landing and tumbled it, ending the day.

The brothers sent a telegram to their father in Dayton. It read, in part: Success. The world press largely ignored the news.

A handful of people stood in the cold and watched. The Wright brothers chose the Outer Banks for its steady Atlantic winds and its soft sand, a forgiving surface for the inevitable crashes of experimentation. They had been coming here since nineteen hundred, building and testing and failing and rebuilding.

The site today is four miles south of the town of Kitty Hawk, at Kill Devil Hills, where the Wright Brothers National Memorial stands on the dune from which they launched. It marks the spot where North Carolina became, as the state license plate has said for decades, the place of First in Flight.