Modern Marvels

Season 10, Episode 82

Episode Title: Technology of Kitty Hawk

Air Date: 2003-12-17

Overview:

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.