Dec. 17, 1923 marked the 20th anniversary of the airplane. On the same day of the year 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright, sons of a clergyman of Dayton, O., in a curious boxlike machine made largely of wood, wire and canvas, propelled by a small gasoline engine, rose from a giant sand dune at Kitty Hawk, N. C, and made an epochal flight of 12 seconds. Taking the air a second time, they flew 852 feet in 59 seconds. The young inventors had braved the derision of all their neighbors, the scepticism of the...
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