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WENTY-FIVE years ago, the seventeenth of December, a crude structure of bamboo and silk, powered with a homemade motor, shot down a wooden rail in the lonely sand dunes at Kitty Hawk, N. C., and took to the air. It flew along for 260 yards and settled gently to earth.

A feat that had intrigued the minds of men since the dawn of recorded history had been accomplished. Two bicycle builders from Dayton, Ohio, Wilbur and Orville Wright, had flown a power machine through the air.

Less than a quarter of a century later the descendants of that first crude flying machine had flown the Atlantic and the Pacific, remained in the air more than sixty hours, traveled more than 4,200 miles without a stop, had been to the North pole, played a vital part in the greatest war in all history, were carrying mail and passengers day and night on regular schedules, and were performing a thousand useful tasks. All that happened within the lifetime of youths who cast their first votes this year, for, while the initial flight was made in 1903 it was not until 1908 that public flights were made.

The pilot on that first flight was Orville, while his brother, the late Wilbur Wright, supervised the take-off. To launch the ship into the air, they mounted it on a rail and used a weight, dropped from a derrick, to give it the initial starting impulse. The motor, built in their Dayton bicycle shop, turned a pair of propellers, through bicycle chain gearing, at the slow speed of 400 revolutions a minute, as compared to the speeds of 1,500 to 1,900 revolutions common in modern airplanes.

The first flight of the motor-powered plane had been preceded by years of experimentation with gliders, in which they had made several thousand flights. Before they tried power, both brothers had learned to fly their gliders in winds with a force up to thirty-five miles an hour, to maneuver them in the air and land safely. In all their glider experiments they had but one accident, when Orville fell thirty-five feet and escaped without a scratch. By the time they were ready to build the power machine for the famous flight of 1903, they knew more than anyone living about the problems of flying.

