Wright Brothers

In the winter of 1903, on the sandy bluffs of Kitty Hawk, N.C., two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, changed the direction of human history.

It was not an empire, a nation or a rich industrialist that delivered flight to the world—it was two bicycle mechanics without formal engineering training and without government largesse or lofty links to the centers of power.

The Wright brothers were not child prodigies. They were not aristocrats. They were ordinary men with an extraordinary obsession: to crack the mystery of flight.

They were born into a world that did not believe in them. The notion that humans might fly had been, until then, the province of mythology and fantasy.