When, in 1927, it was decided to erect a monument to commemorate the first controlled powered flight of an airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the place was considered so remote that Congress figured no one would ever deliberately visit such a fly- and mosquito-infested sand spit. So isolated was Kitty Hawk, that the planners assigned to the memorial task required a five-day round trip from Washington just to survey the site.
Clearly, there was to be no aeronautical Lincoln Memorial in such a wasteland and Congress instead settled on what’s there now: a simple, albeit impressive, stone monument rendered in the Art Deco style that reads as fresh to the eye now as it did when it was dedicated in 1932, attended by Orville Wright, who was then 61. (Wilbur Wright died of typhoid fever in 1912.) To justify the project, Congress ordered a light placed atop the monument and anointed it as a Coast Guard coastal navigation aid.
The monument now commands the center of the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kitty Hawk and it alone is worth both the visit and the semi-arduous trek to the top of Kill Devil Hill. The Wrights did that climb many hundreds of times, dragging gliders upslope, teaching themselves the rudiments of aeronautics a handful of seconds at a time, between crashes, skids through the sand and uncommanded turns they called “well digging.”
The monument was restored in 2008 and recently, in time for this year’s First Flight Day on Dec. 17, the museum/visitor center got a facelift, too, as I reported in this video. Some 88 years after the fact, the park service seems to have similarly assumed that Kitty Hawk is still too far off the main bus line to warrant a more ambitious facility than the one originally erected there in 1960.
That’s perhaps one reason to explain declaring the original building architecturally important enough to preserve and restore. It was built under a program called Mission 66, in which the Park Service planned to—and did—dramatically expand facilities by 1966. As such, the design is efficient and spare—in other words, cheap. It was the first structure of its kind on a national park, so that’s another reason the Park Service restored it, I suppose. It’s basically slab-sided concrete reminiscent of a 1960s elementary school with a splash of Eero Saarinen. There’s room on the site for a larger museum and that may yet happen. But not this time.
It’s a minor complaint, because the exhibit designers did a terrific job of reworking the interior with new displays that tell the Wrights’ story in satisfyingly rich detail. The museum’s main arena, called the Flight Room, has a replica 1903 Flyer and one wall dedicated to an all-encompassing technical evolution of the Wrights’ journey from kites to controlled powered flight. Give it 10 minutes and you’ll have a grasp of the Wright genius. One intent is to ignite youthful interest in STEM pursuits and that it ought to do.
I’ve been visiting the Outer Banks and Wright Memorial since the early 1970s, yet in all that time I’ve never been unaffected by the place. The impact of the Wrights’ achievement in such a remote place has always struck me as a tableau of time and distance. The inscription wraps the monument with these words: “In commemoration of the conquest of the air by the brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright. Conceived by genius. Achieved by dauntless resolution and unconquerable faith.”
It’s a nice 25 words and what a speech writer might call reaching for the marble or, in this case, granite. When you consider the distance the Wrights had to travel just to reach Kitty Hawk, dauntless resolution seems an understatement. From Dayton, it was a four- or five-day trip that entailed a sometimes precarious boat trip across Albemarle Sound. Crates were necessary to bring all the materials and supplies: ash and spruce for the structure; muslin fabric; needles, scissors and knives; wire; steel fasteners; wrenches and sockets; nails, screws; planes and spokeshaves; handsaws; chisels; screwdrivers; hammers; glue; clamps; weather instruments; camping gear and provisions. And a camera. Wilbur’s expensive Korona-V view camera was the Hasselblad of its day whose use was well in keeping with the brothers’ scientifically rigorous approach to flight test. It also cemented for posterity that only the Wrights had incontrovertible documentation that they were the first to achieve powered controlled flight. The Wrights made four trips to Kitty Hawk, culminating in the 1903 powered flight. Orville returned in 1911 to conduct extensive glider experiments.
At this year’s First Flight ceremony, Darrell Collins, a now-retired park ranger well known for his interpretive talks on the Wrights, invited the audience to once again consider both distance and time. The Wrights ignited an astonishing chain of events that, within the typical lifespan of a human, led from footprints in the sand of Kitty Hawk to bootprints in the regolith of the Sea of Tranquility. Slicing those years into subsets reveals more progress to ponder. The press was blas about the 1903 flight and while the Wrights weren’t secretive, they continued work in Ohio toward practical aircraft. Five years later, Wilbur’s flight demonstrations in France electrified Europe and the world.
Wilbur didn’t live long enough to see the era of rapid aeronautical advancement, but Orville did. He died in 1948 at the age of 77, long enough to see his work result in all of the world’s oceans being spanned by the airplane, the jet engine, supersonic flight and routine airline travel to compile the shortest list. When I was interviewing Wright historian and author Tom Crouch for the video, he said he’s sometimes asked if the Wrights hadn’t come along at the opportune moment, would these things have happened anyway.
“That question is almost impossible to answer, because the people who came behind the Wright brothers were all inspired by the Wright brothers,” Crouch says.
If that was true 15 years after the Wrights flew, it’s still true 115 years after December 17th, 1903.
