The calendar on the wall here in America’s first wind-powered brewery says April 2017, but I’m thinking about what happened here in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903.
Had the Outer Banks Brewing Station been here the day Wilbur and Orville Wright made the world’s first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft, I like to think they would have dropped in here afterwards to celebrate.
“To the human imagination,” Wilbur might have said as they toasted their accomplishment.
“To the death of impossibility,” Orville might have added.
The brothers first become interested in flight in 1896, when they begin tinkering in their Dayton, Ohio bicycle shop. They build kites, experiment with mechanical devices, and observe turkey buzzards soaring over the Great Miami River south of Dayton.
Despite skeptical friends and neighbours telling them human flight is impossible, the Wright Brothers are undeterred. Working together, they keep tinkering. Their determination to build a flying machine moves them forward.
When Orville takes off from Big Kill Devil Hill at 10:35 a.m. and flies for 12 seconds — a distance of 36.5 metres (120 ft.) with a speed of between 11 and 13 kilometres per hour — he and Wilbur prove to the world that the human imagination is limitless. Thanks to their genius, and the steady 24-to-32 kilometre per hour winds of the Outer Banks, the sky is conquered. From this day forward, nothing is impossible.
“I chose Kitty Hawk,” Wilbur writes to his father during his first trip to the Outer Banks in September 1900, “because it seemed the place which most clearly met the required conditions…At Kitty Hawk, which is on the narrow bar separating the Sound from the Ocean, there are neither hills nor trees, so that it offers a safe place for practice. Also, the wind there is stronger than any place near home and is almost constant.”
In a 1919 letter, Orville explains to the president of The American Flying Club an important reason why he and his brother achieved success.
“At Kitty Hawk we had the opportunity of witnessing daily the soaring flight of buzzards, fish and chicken hawks, and eagles.”
From their observations, they learned that birds adjust the angle of their wingtips to make their bodies roll right or left. At the time, the skeptics, and everyone else who thought the Wright Brothers were crazy, never noticed that.
They would have noticed today, though, had they been with me watching the soaring birds above the Wright Brothers Monument, an impressive 27-metre-tall (90 ft.) granite memorial commemorating the site of the first flights. They also would have noticed the vintage biplane taking off and landing at the nearby Kill Devil Hills First Flight Airport.
Thinking about Wilbur and Orville’s accomplishment on that windy December day long ago, I raise my glass to each of them.
“To the human imagination,” Wilbur might have said.
“To the death of impossibility,” Orville might have added.
