Pioneers Gallery

First flight of Wright brothers aircraft, Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, USA, December 17

First flight of Wright brothers aircraft, Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, USA, December 17, 1903. The first powered, heavier-than-air controlled flight in history flight lasted 12 seconds and flew a distance of 120 feet. Orville Wright piloted the historic flight while his brother, Wilbur, observed. The brothers took three other flights that day, each flight lasting longer than the other with the final flight going a distance of 852 feet in 59 seconds. This flight was the culmination of a number of years of research on gliders. In 1909 the Army Signal Corps purchased a Wright Flyer, creating the first military airplane. Although Wilbur passed away May 30, 1912, from typhoid fever, Orville remained an active promoter of aviation until his death on January 30, 1948

© Heritage Space/Heritage Images

Pilot Knob, 1872. Creator: Henry Duff Linton

Pilot Knob, 1872. Covered wagons travelling west past Pilot Rock, a volcanic plug in Oregon, USA: one sees rising in the blue air the singular form of Pilot Knob, an elevation of the Siskiyou Mountains which, becoming a landmark to immigrants journeying to Oregon, has attained its name. This rock is a great mass of black volcanic substance, which rises perpendicularly from the mountain-crest. The Siskiyou Range has here an elevation of twenty-five hundred feet, and the knob is about five hundred feet higher...The volcanic origin of the mountains all through this region accounts for their singular lack of beauty. The angles are so sharp that the earth which covers their skeletons cannot adhere, and comes off in great land-slides, leaving the mountain-sides bare and exposed'. From "Picturesque America; or, The Land We Live In, A Delineation by Pen and Pencil of the Mountains, Rivers, Lakes...with Illustrations on Steel and Wood by Eminent American Artists" Vol. I, edited by William Cullen Bryant. [D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1872]

© The Print Collector/Heritage Images