Civilian aviator Eugene Ely took off from a specially built platform on the deck of the USS Birmingham, anchored off Hampton Roads, Virginia, completing the first flight ever launched from a ship. The rickety wooden ramp and the plane's near-crash into the water on takeoff belied the moment's significance: naval aviation, which would reshape 20th-century warfare, had just been born.
The U.S. Navy in 1910 was skeptical that airplanes, still barely seven years removed from the Wright brothers' first flight, had any practical military use. Captain Washington Irving Chambers, tasked with investigating aviation's potential, convinced the Navy to let him test whether a plane could take off from a warship at all.
Engineers built a sloped wooden platform, just 83 feet long, over the bow of the scout cruiser USS Birmingham. Civilian pilot Eugene Ely, already known for his daredevil flying exhibitions, volunteered for the test despite having never attempted anything like it. As his Curtiss pusher biplane rolled down the short ramp, it dipped alarmingly toward the water, and Ely's propeller and landing gear actually clipped the waves before he managed to climb away.
He landed safely on a nearby beach minutes later, but the point had been proven: airplanes could operate from ships. Two months later, Ely completed the reverse feat, landing on a platform built on the USS Pennsylvania using a primitive arresting-hook system, foreshadowing the aircraft carrier. Ely died in a crash less than a year later, but his experiments convinced the Navy to invest seriously in aviation, a decision that would prove decisive three decades later in the Pacific.