100 Years Anniversary of World
Aviation Wilbur Wright Orville Wright

Some might understandably suggest that the airplane was invented by Sir George Cayley in 1799 at Brompton, near Scarborough in Yorkshire in UK and the first man to fly was Richard Pierce, of New Zealand, but it is well recorded that the first powered, controlled flight was that of Orville Wright on 17th December 1903. The flight, all 12 seconds covering 120 ft., was made at Kill Devil Hills, near Kitty Hawk in North Carolina. During the fourth and final flight that day, Wilbur Wright flew for 59 seconds covering 852 ft.

Wilbur and Orville Wright were two brothers from the heartland of America with a vision as sweeping as the sky and a practicality as down -to-earth as the Wright Cycles Co., the bicycle business they founded in Dayton, Ohio, in 1892. But while there were countless bicycle shops in turn of the century America, in only one were wings being built as well as wheels.

When the Wright brothers finally realized their vision of powered human flight, they made the world a forever smaller place. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, the Short Brothers (Eustace, Oswald & Horace) were piloting coal-gas balloons and, in 1905, they supplied balloons to the British Army in India. Three years later the Short Brothers, in agreement with the Wright Brothers, obtained the rights (and orders) to commercially build the "Wright Flyer" in the U.K. Thus the World's First Aircraft Flyers and the World's First Aircraft Manufacturers combined knowledge and skills to work together.