When man took to the skies: one hundred years ago this month, in Kitty Hawk, N.C., the Wright brothers gave the world powered flight.

• Author: Price, Sean
• Position: Times Past

On Dec. 8, 1903, Samuel Langley watched helplessly as 17 years of hard work crashed into the Potomac River near Washington. His winged "aerodrome," shot over the water from a catapult, briefly soared upward, then plummeted backward into the waves, The pilot barely escaped.

As secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, Langley was considered the most likely inventor to create the first powered airplane. But his botched experiment was the latest in a string of failures.

By 1903, flops by many would-be aviators had convinced skeptics that powered flight by humans might never take place. In October, a New York Times editorial said: "The flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to 10 million years."

TWO BROTHERS FROM OHIO

Unbeknownst to most of the world, that flying machine was being readied near Kitty 11awk, N.C., by two brothers named Wilbur and Olwille Wright, bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio. They had struggled for four years to create a workable airplane. On the day of Langley's December disaster, they were a little more than a week away from proving that powered flight was indeed possible.

The Wrights' interest in flight was first stirred about 1878, when Wilbur was 11 and Orville 7. The boys' father had brought home a toy helicopter powered by robber bands that they played with until it fell apart. (Real helicopters didn't come into regular use until the 1940s.)

The boys became self-taught tinkerers and inventors. In 1892, a bicycling craze prompted them to open their own bicycle shop in Dayton, which was successful enough that by 1899, when Wilhur was 32 and Orville 28, they could turn their attention to powered flight.

Humans had been flying since the French brothers Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier invented hot-air balloons in 1783. However, balloons relied on lighter-than-air gases like hydrogen and could not be steered with any precision. There had also been some successful hights of gliders since the 1890s. But no one had been able to put an engine on an aircraft and send it aloft with a person on board.

CONTROL WAS THE KEY

When the Wright brothers began studying the problem, they found that even the experts didn't know very much. Most inventors focused on an aircraft's shape or the size of its engine. But the Wrights saw that controlling the craft was the bigger issue.

To test their theories, they headed to...