Posted on Monday, Jun. 29, 2009
Journalists had to hide to see Wrights fly
By JOSH SHAFFER
On a breezy Thursday in 1908, five big-city reporters hid in a patch of woods, scratched at chiggers biting their sweaty bodies and bore secret witness to the marvel of a new century: the Wright Brothers circling Kill Devil Hill in a gasoline-powered airplane.The famous pair had been flying for several years, notching the world's first powered, manned, controlled flight on the Outer Banks in December 1903. But they were secretive, distrustful and obsessed with protecting their own patent from competition, so few had seen them fly. For all the world knew, the Wrights were fakers.East Carolina University history professor Larry Tise argues in a new book that this 1908 moment of clandestine journalism was the most pivotal for the Wrights and for the history of flight. Once these reporters filed their stories -- shot through though they were with errors and exaggerations -- the world knew for the first time that it was possible to launch a manned machine into the air, keep it going, and steer it.
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Identifying the Wright Brother's Makeshift Table
ECU faculty, students work to authenticate Wright brothers artifact
GREENVILLE (4/22/2008)—When the Wright Brothers moved to Kitty Hawk to follow the wind more than a century ago, they brought limited household supplies. Their thoughts seemed to be focused more on glider materials at first than basic goods to get their “camp” established.
One of the crates that shipped supplies to “W. Wright, Elizabeth City, North Carolina” is believed to have been recycled by the Wrights to create the top of a wooden kitchen table, which resurfaced last month in Kitty Hawk.
“WORLD ALOFT 1908”
Path-breaking Exhibit Explores the World’s FirstDiscovery of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk in 1908
If you asked most Americans (or at least Americans in North Carolina and Ohio) when the world went aloft—i.e., started flying—the answer would almost surely point to the historic flights of Wilbur and Orville Wright at Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903. After all, the Wright brothers’ “first flight” was indelibly recorded that morning in one of the most famous photographs ever to come from a camera. And it has been ossified by both states associated with the Wright brothers in license plates, commemorative quarters, and lavish centennial celebrations at Dayton and at Kitty Hawk in 2003.
