1908: The Year the Airplane Went Public Five years after Kitty
Hawk, the Wrights finally showed the world their invention. - By
Tom D. Crouch - AirSpaceMag.com, August 29, 2008 The honor is
indisputably theirs: Wilbur and Orville Wright made the first
powered, sustained, controlled, heavier-than-air flights at Kill
Devil Hills, North Carolina on December 17, 1903. But even
though they had succeeded, the Wrights recognized that they had
a considerable distance to go before they could claim to have
developed a practical flying machine. So they continued their
work in a Dayton cow pasture in 1904 and 1905. By the fall of
1905, they had transformed the marginal success of 1903 into the
reality of a practical airplane capable of traveling many miles
through the air and remaining aloft for more than an hour at a
time. The Wrights worried about being copied, though. Unwilling
to unveil their creation without the protection of a patent and
a signed sales contract, the brothers remained on the ground for
the next two