Wright We read so much about aerial battles involving hundreds of machines these days that some of us are inclined to forget that Orville Wright - one of the Wright brothers, the first men to achieve power-driven controlled flight - is still alive and taking an active interest in aviation.
He celebrates his 69th birthday today, and Americans are marking the event by unveiling a memorial to the achievement of the two brothers on a hill overlooking the sand dunes at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where the first flights were made on December 17th, 1903.
On that day the Wrights made four flights, the longest covering 852 feet in 59 seconds (a speed approximately 30 miles per hour); their machine (with the pilot) weighed about 900lb. Today, when we read of fighter aircraft flying at 400 m.p.h., of bombers and passenger aircraft covering many thousands of miles non-stop, and flying-boats weighing thirty tons and more, it seems a little difficult to realise that men were still struggling to discover the art of flying only 37 years ago.
Wilbur Wright, the elder of the two brothers, died in 1912 at the age of 45. Their first machine is in the Science Museum at South Kensington, London, and near it is the converted Vickers-Vimy bomber in which Alcock and Brown made the first trans-Atlantic flight from Newfoundland to Clifden in 1919.
The Irish Times, August 14th, 1940.