Wright brothers launched revolution

By Seth Borenstein
Knight Ridder News Service

KILL DEVIL HILLS, N.C. — No one knows who first harnessed the awesome power of fire. No date is recorded for the first spin of a wheel. But here where the turbulent Atlantic meets the dunes of North Carolina's Outer Banks, on a blustery Dec. 17, 1903, man first conquered the air.

Wilbur Wright was a self-trained engineer who knew early on that man could fly.

Orville Wright was a lifelong tinkerer — and the first to fly the Wright Flyer. Associated Press library photos

"An event occurred right there that we know changed the course of history," said National Park Service ranger Jim Cross, pointing to a spot about 50 feet away in what used to be the outskirts of Kitty Hawk. Orville Wright's first flight at 10:35 a.m. lasted 12 seconds, about the time it takes to sing the alphabet. He flew just 120 feet, laboring so slowly against a headwind that his brother, Wilbur, could trot along beside him.

That first short hop launched a revolution. It has transformed things we can measure, such as time and distance, and things we can't, such as hope and faith. It has even altered the basics of humanity: life and death.

With air travel, the world shrank in size. Nowhere is too far to go. The pace of our lives has quickened to the point that nothing seems to travel fast enough. Until the Wright brothers, people traveled mainly in two dimensions: forward and back. The airplane opened the world to the possibilities of up.

And up captivates the human spirit.

"Five hundred years from now when Americans look back at this era, the greatest accomplishment of this century will be flight," said prominent historian Douglas Brinkley of the University of New Orleans. "It was the beginning of seeing Earth as a whole. Humankind had been trying to figure out how to be airborne since our earliest days, and here on the shores of North Carolina it had occurred."

Before the Wright brothers, men said that if God had meant for man to fly, he would have given him wings. After 1903, that humility gave way to the conviction that humans — and their technology — could do just about anything. Just 66 years later, the phrase was: "If they can put a man on the moon, why can't they ... ?"

"It was the very definition of the impossible, and we did it," said Tom Crouch, a senior curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington and a leading Wright brothers biographer. "For millennia, flight had come to symbolize that to which we all aspire. It's an attribute of gods and heroes. And all of a sudden there it was: We had done it."

Flying isn't just physical. It's metaphysical, touching on dreams, religion and even sex.

"The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors, who — in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times — looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space," said Wilbur Wright.

For thousands of years, flight was a common religious theme. People would dream and even attempt to fly in order to "see the world as God sees the world," said John Staudenmaier, a Jesuit priest and historian at the University of Detroit Mercy.

Orville Wright is at the controls of the Wright Flyer as his brother, Wilbur, watches during the plane's first flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., on Dec. 17, 1903. The plane, made of wood, wire and cloth, remained aloft for 12 seconds and traveled a distance of 120 feet. Associated Press library photo

And, the Greek myth warned, if we tried too hard to imitate the gods, if we flew too close to the sun, we would crash like Icarus.

Sigmund Freud has a less spiritual view of human flight. Dreams of flying are really about sex, Freud wrote in his landmark book "Interpretation of Dreams," which was published the year the Wright brothers first flew.

Their victory tamed gravity and made the airplane a symbol of man's power to overcome the fundamental laws of the universe. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet Union used the plane "as an icon of the state's power" and as a secular symbol to replace religious ones, said Scott Palmer, a Western Illinois University professor.

During World War II, "cargo cults" popped up in remote South Pacific islands after airplanes began dropping food and provisions from the sky. The natives ended up worshiping the planes as gods because they carried miracles.

Today, that mystic quality is gone. Flying is about speed and distance.

"Flying has torn apart the relationship of space and time," famed aviator Charles Lindbergh once said, noting how the world seemed smaller and faster than before.

In 1903, when the Wright brothers left their home in Dayton, Ohio, for Kitty Hawk, it took them 2 1/2 days by train, ferry and rented boat. Today, a private jet flying at 530 mph can make the trip in a little more than an hour.

"America is about speed," said historian Brinkley. "The hearts of our civic life have become the airports."

More than 80 percent of Americans over the age of 20 have flown, increasingly for personal rather than business reasons.

"What the airplane has done is bring us physically closer together," biographer Crouch said.

Flying has become routine, even drudgery. When people first start flying, they often get window seats to gaze outside, but as they fly for business they often go for the legroom of aisle seats and rarely look up from their laptops.

"What had been an awe-filled human experience of rising-above-it-all and seeing the Earth whole is now just a link in your project-dominated work life," said historian Staudenmaier, the editor of the journal Technology and Culture.

But man quickly found darker and deadlier work for airplanes.

Before the airplane, wars were mostly waged in two dimensions (hot air balloons were the exception). Now they're fought in three. When in 1921 and 1923 upstart Army officer Billy Mitchell proved to a skeptical military that an airplane could sink a warship, the need to control the seas gave way to the need for "air superiority."

The Japanese paid attention, bombed Pearl Harbor and got America into World War II. During the war, Orville Wright wrote to Henry Ford, saying, "The aeroplane will be our main reliance in restoring peace to the world."

America ended that war and opened yet another era of warfare by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Usually, the airplane has given the United States a great advantage in war, said Brinkley, as it recently did in Afghanistan and Iraq. But on Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists turned that aerial advantage against America.

"The level of violence would never have come about if people couldn't fly across oceans and drop bombs or fly into buildings," said Marianne Hudec, a grandniece of the Wright brothers. In his old age, Orville Wright was often asked about that violence, and Hudec said he would respond, "It's like fire. Fire can do terrible damage and it is also a very positive thing."

But Orville also saw firsthand that airplanes kill accidentally, too. He was the pilot in the world's first fatal airplane accident, a 1908 test flight for the U.S. Army that killed his passenger, Lt. Thomas Selfridge. Since then, nearly 78,000 people have died worldwide in air accidents — about the population of Scranton, Pa.

The airplane has also sowed death by ferrying infectious diseases across oceans and mountains. The SARS epidemic "spread air hub to air hub by passengers traveling by airplane," said Dr. David Morens, an epidemiologist and medical historian at the National Institutes of Health. Other contagious diseases, from HIV and AIDS to conjunctivitis, have infected different parts of the world by air travel. This will only increase in the future, he said.

Yet, the shipping of medicine and food by airplane helped eradicate smallpox, diminished polio and fought hunger. The Berlin airlift of 1948, when food and supplies landed in a blockaded city every few minutes, illustrated aviation's power as a strategic tool, foiling the then-Soviet Union's attempt to besiege the city.

More mundane air shipments, from next-day deliveries to quick clearing of out-of-town checks, are crucial to American business. In the United States, civil aviation is a $900 billion-a-year industry.

Yet the airplane's importance remains more cultural than commercial, according to one of the world's most successful businessmen.

"The Wright brothers created the single greatest cultural force since the invention of writing," Microsoft founder Bill Gates said in 1998. "The airplane became the first World Wide Web, bringing people of different languages, ideas and values together."