12 Seconds at Kitty Hawk: The Wright Brothers' First Flight

Orville Wright started his diary entry for Thursday, December 17, 1903, with the weather.

"When we got up a wind of between 20 and 25 miles was blowing from the north."

The brothers flew anyway. By noon, they had made four flights, and the last one went 852 feet.

Three days earlier

They had already tried once. On December 14, at their camp near Kill Devil Hills, outside Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Wilbur and Orville tossed a coin to see who would go first. Wilbur won. The Flyer left the rail, stalled, and crashed, slightly damaging the machine. The Library of Congress notes that the brothers did not count it as a true flight.

By the 17th, it was fixed. This time it was Orville's turn.

The witnesses

Five men came out that morning. Orville named them in his diary: John T. Daniels, W.S. Dough, and A.D. Etheridge from the Kill Devil Hills Life-Saving Station, W.C. Brinkley of Manteo, and a man from Nags Head the diary calls Johnny Moore.

Orville set up his camera on a tripod, aimed it at the end of the launching rail, and showed Daniels how and when to trip the shutter.

The Flyer would take off from level ground, running along a 60-foot rail into the wind. No hill, no push. The weather bureau's instrument nearby read 27 miles an hour.

10:35 a.m.

"I got on the machine at 10:35 for the first trial," Orville wrote.

The Flyer ran down the rail with Wilbur alongside and lifted into the air. Daniels tripped the shutter. That is the famous photograph: Orville lying flat at the controls, the machine a few feet off the sand, Wilbur standing to the right.

The flight covered 120 feet. Orville's diary is honest about the time: "Time about 12 seconds (not known exactly as watch was not promptly stopped)."

The National Park Service and the Smithsonian describe it the same way: the first successful powered, controlled flight of a heavier-than-air machine.

Four flights by noon

The brothers took turns. At about 11:20, Wilbur flew about 175 feet. At about 11:40, Orville went again. The Park Service's flight markers record 200 feet in 15 seconds.

At noon, Wilbur made the fourth flight. "The distance over the ground was 852 feet in 59 seconds," Orville wrote.

Then the wind took over. A gust caught the Flyer and turned it over. Daniels was caught up in it. "His escape was miraculous, as he was in with the engine and chains," Orville wrote. Daniels came away with a few bruises. In a later account preserved by the Smithsonian, he called himself the first victim of an airplane crash.

The Flyer was too badly damaged to fly again that year. As the Smithsonian puts it, all of its flying took place on a single chilly December morning.

A telegram home

After lunch, the brothers walked about four miles to Kitty Hawk. The only telegraph there was a government wire at the Weather Bureau office, connected to Norfolk. The operator there, an old correspondent of the brothers, sent a telegram from Orville to their father, Bishop Milton Wright, in Dayton, Ohio.

It reported four flights against a 21-mile wind, an average speed through the air of 31 miles an hour, and "longest 57 seconds." That was one of two mistakes made in sending it. The flight had lasted 59 seconds, and Orville's name came out "Orevelle." The message ended with the plan that mattered most to a family in Dayton: "home Christmas."

It reached Dayton at 5:25 that afternoon. The brothers packed up their broken machine and were home on the evening of December 23.

The press did not do much better. The next day's Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk reported a flight of three miles at a height of 60 feet, and even worked the word "Eureka" into the story. The distance, the height, and the "Eureka" were all wrong.

The machine

The 1903 Flyer had a wingspan of 40 feet 4 inches and weighed 605 pounds empty. Its four-cylinder, 12-horsepower engine was built with the help of their mechanic, Charlie Taylor.

For 20 years, the Flyer was not even in America. Orville was in a long dispute with the Smithsonian, which had put a rebuilt version of its former secretary Samuel Langley's machine on display as the first capable of carrying a man in flight, and was slow to credit the Wrights. In 1928, Orville sent the Flyer to the Science Museum in London instead.

The dispute ended after the Smithsonian, in 1942, published a correction of its Langley claims. The Flyer came home, and on December 17, 1948, the 45th anniversary of the first flight, it went on display in Washington. Orville had died that January and did not see it.