The eastern coastline of North Carolina is a thin strip of land separating the Atlantic ocean from inland waterways. Along that strip of land is a town called Kitty Hawk, and some six kilometres south of the town are the Kill Devil Hills where, some 109 years ago today that brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight. The area was selected because of its frequent winds and soft sandy surfaces.
The Wright brothers had gone into business and printers and newspaper publishers in 1889, and then opened a bicycle shop in 1892. In the 1890s, many people were trying to build heavier-than-air flying machines, with mixed success and often ending in tragedy, and the Wright brothers became convinced that the key to success involved developing stable controls which would make the flight safe, starting with gliding and working up to powered flight once the controls had been mastered.
From observing the flight of birds, the brothers decided to use wing warping to cause their machine to bank to the left or right, thereby enabling steering. In 1900 they began their visits to Kitty Hawk, starting their experiments with a glider. In 1901 they built a wind tunnel in their bicycle shop and used it to conduct tests on large numbers of different model wing shapes, leading to a fully controlled glider and then in 1903 to the powered Wright Flyer I.