Aviation

The most famous aviation photograph ever made was taken by a man who had never used a camera before. On December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright set up his camera and asked John T. Daniels, a member of the local lifesaving crew, to squeeze the bulb if the airplane got off the ground. It did, and he did.

The Wright brothers were careful record keepers, and they photographed their gliders and airplanes for years. Their glass negatives are now in the Library of Congress. They show 2 bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio, working out the problem of flight in a methodical way, with test after test on the sand dunes.

Flight caught on quickly with the public. Within a few years there were air meets drawing huge crowds, and pilots competed for prize money with stunts and races. The early airplanes were fragile things of wood, wire and fabric, and many of the pilots in these pictures died young. The Army bought its first airplane from the Wrights in 1909, and by World War I aircraft had become weapons.

After the war, surplus planes and former military pilots went into barnstorming, touring small towns and selling rides. The Post Office started regular airmail in 1918. Then in May 1927 Charles Lindbergh flew alone and nonstop from New York to Paris, and he became the most famous man in the world almost overnight. The photographs of his return show crowds that are hard to believe.

Look at the people on the ground in these pictures. In the early images nearly everyone is looking up, because an airplane overhead was still astonishing. Look at the clothing, too. Early pilots flew in open cockpits wearing leather coats, goggles and caps, and some of the first passengers sat out in the wind beside them.