Happy Birthday Flight!
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 12.17.03 | 9:26 PM ET
It’s been 100 years to the day since the Wright brothers changed the world with their 12-second flight over Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Their invention was, as the New York Times so carefully put it today, “the first power-driven heavier-than-air machine in which humans made free, controlled and sustained flight.” The Times offers a slew of articles marking the anniversary. The main story explores the Wrights’ accomplishment: “What did they do that had been overlooked by better-known and more experienced would-be inventors? It is one of the most arresting questions about the Wrights and the invention of flight.” For readers who aren’t up to pondering those questions but would like to make stuff, the Times offers a how-to story on making paper airplanes, including the model that holds the world record for most time aloft: 27.6 seconds. That’s one serious paper airplane! But our favorite article about the anniversary is still Pico Iyer’s eloquent essay from Via magazine, which we pointed to when it first appeared in October. “It’s hard at this point to imagine a world in which Orville and Wilbur Wright had not made their small experiment a hundred years ago,” Iyer wrote. “In a world without flight, half the people in your neighborhood might not be there. Most of the products in your stores would still be in far-off jungles or on distant continents. You’d receive no airmail, and neither your president nor your next-door neighbor would be flying off to Europe this week and then Asia over the weekend. Most of all, your very sense of possibility, of how and where you live your life, would be radically foreshortened.”
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
