Powered flight
Twelve seconds at Kitty Hawk, and sixty-six years later a Moon landing.
- When
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
The Wright brothers fly on 17 December 1903 — their real contribution being three-axis control rather than the engine, which everyone else was chasing. They tested wings in a wind tunnel they built themselves after finding published lift tables wrong. Aviation is militarised within a decade, crosses the Atlantic in 1919, and becomes a mass transport system after 1945.