Once the news of the flights traveled from Kitty Hawk to the world, many responded with indifference. Frank Tunison, an Associated Press reporter stationed in Dayton, dismissed the report as insifficiently newsworthy. Misreading the telegram that reported a 59 second flight as 57 seconds, Tunison responded; "57 seconds, hey? If it'd been 57 minutes then it might have been a news item." Tunison missed one of the great news stories of the century.

Orville and Wilbur Wright were the younger sons of the Rev. Milton Wright, a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, and a staunch defender of conservative doctrine in his denomination. The Wrights grew up in an active household that was unquestionably led by a strong father and infused with a work ethic. Long before turning to flight, the Wright brothers had already established a printing operation and were running a bicycle shop in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Dayton then stood at the statistical population center of the United States and, despite its rather modest population, ranked third in the nation in terms of new patents.

Wilbur Wright was the first to turn his interest to flight. Observing the attempts of others, he noted a critical failure of both technique and technology. Speaking before the Western Society of Engineers, Wilbur had earlier noted that the greatest challenge to flight was "the balancing and steering of the machine after it is actually in flight." Wilbur gave himself to this challenge and was later joined by Orville. Their pioneering understanding of the mechanics of flight came only after repeated failures and lengthy experiments they conducted in one of the first wind tunnels ever developed.

Looking back over the last century, we can now see that powered human flight transformed life across the globe. In a very real sense, human history can be divided between the age prior to flight and the age of aviation.

Among the transformations brought by powered flight, none has eclipsed the reality that human beings can now travel to the most remote parts of the earth within 24 hours. Modern jet aircraft can circumnavigate the globe faster that some previous generations could travel only 100 miles. In the United States, the development of the airplane brought a commercial revolution and virtually ended the age of passenger transportation by railroad. Cities rushed to develop airports and to gain their place in commercial aviation. The first commercial flight, flown in 1914 between St. Petersburg and Tampa, Florida, offered only a hint of what was to come. The globe is now webbed by a worldwide system of airline transportation.

The development of the airplane also brought immediate transformations in warfare. This was evident already in World War I, when all major European powers had an air force of some form at the onset of the conflict. The primitive aircraft with which the war began were quickly followed by more powerful and sophisticated craft that demonstrated the shape of things to come. As historian Walter J. Boyne notes: "By 1918 almost every aspect of modern air warfare, with the exceptions of nuclear weapons, space-based satellites and precision-guided ammunitions, had been demonstrated."