Monday Milestone: Sky’s the Limit
“The Wright Brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility"
– Charles Ketterling
This Week in History:
1903, December 17
The Wright Brothers achieve the first ever heavier than air human flight by lifting the Wright Flyer I above the field in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, embarking upon a new frontier, and ultimately changing the world as we know it.
How long has it been since you took a flight?
A few months? A few days? Are you on the plane now reading this? (thanks if you are).
It’s part of modern life for so many Australians.
So this week the Milestone tries to imagine a world without air travel, as the Delorean stops in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina watching two brothers achieving among the most famous scientific experiments of all time.
Wilbur and Orville Wright were in that field that day successfully trialling the very first airplane. It’d been a while coming. They had spent the previous years perfecting a series of gliders and now had decided to introduce propellers and lightweight aluminium engines in an attempt to sustain getting the craft off the ground.
Into a freezing head wind, and armed with the experience of a failed attempt, that particular day, Orville Wright held the honour of the very first flight, lasting 120 feet. History was made and the world suddenly got that much smaller.
Consider the ground breaking nature of this event. Few inventions have changed the world in such a manner. Just like the wheel, electricity, the internal combustion engine, or the personal computer the world changed forever.
However during those twelve seconds Orville Wright spent in the air on that first flight, it’s almost certain he wasn’t considering the flow on impacts his feats would have on the world of sport.
More than a century later, in our age of multi-million dollar contracts with television deals, sport would be impossible without air travel. Closing the gap between this match and the next is paramount, financially. Providing the opportunity for as many locations play host is also imperative to maximise audiences.
Today for example, Minnesota take on Orlando and Houston travel to New York in the NBA. Monday Night Football has the New York Jets heading to Nashville, Tennessee to tackle the Titans. North American sport, more than anywhere, is so thoroughly dependent on air travel, as over the four major sports in the United States and Canada, some 58 major cities and towns are utilised. And that doesn’t include college championships. Imagine today without the Wright Brothers. The commute would be a bitch. The season would take years.
And closer to home, consider the NRL. How else would the Melbourne Storm take on the New Zealand Warriors each Anzac Day? Ultimately, logistically, we would need to revert to a Sydney based competition, the way it used to be before air travel. Back to a time when even Newcastle was forced to withdraw from the NSWRL because travel to Sydney was too difficult. And whilst that might wonderfully resurrect the North Sydney Bears, it’s doubtful that would result in a superior competition.
We owe such a debt of gratitude to the Wright Brothers. Without that landmark day in Kitty Hawk, the world would be such a different place.
And sport, would be the poorer for it.
Milestone Five: Famous Flights in history
1. 1903 – In Wright Flyer I, Orville Wright completes the first heavier than air flight at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina
2. 1927 – Charles Lindbergh in the Spirit of St Louis crosses the Atlantic from New York to Paris.
3. 1928 – Charles Kingsford Smith successfully crosses the Pacific in the Southern Cross
4. 1947 – Chuck Yeager officially breaks the sound barrier in an aircraft he christened Glamourous Glennis
5. 1957 – Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space.
