Airplane

The first successful powered, controlled flight of a heavier-than-air machine was made by the American brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright on the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903. Their aircraft, the Wright Flyer, was a biplane driven by a petrol engine they had built themselves and two propellers. Orville made the first flight, which lasted about twelve seconds, and the brothers made three further flights that day, the longest by Wilbur lasting nearly a minute. The Wrights, who ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, had solved the problem of control by studying birds, using a wind tunnel and building gliders. They built on the earlier work of Sir George Cayley and Otto Lilienthal. Within a decade aeroplanes were widely used, and they were developed rapidly during the First World War.

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