Modern Marvels

Technology of Kitty Hawk (10x82)

: 17, 2003

Two brainy bicycle makers...a remote North Carolina moonscape...and an impossible dream. On December 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright took wing at Kitty Hawk and flew--as none before had--unraveling a complex problem that had defied history's most inventive minds, from Leonard da Vinci to Edison. How did these high-school dropouts from Dayton, Ohio do it? Experts at the controls of full-scale replicas explain how they worked--or didn't--and historians recount the brothers' heated arguments.