At Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, Orville Wright lay prone on the lower wing of the Wright Flyer and coaxed it into the air for 12 seconds, covering 120 feet. Wilbur ran alongside. Five witnesses watched, including a lifesaving station crew. By day's end the brothers had flown four times, the longest lasting 59 seconds and covering 852 feet, opening the age of aviation.
The wind that morning gusted to 27 miles per hour, colder and stronger than the brothers would have liked, but they had already lost weeks to weather and were eager to beat other inventors to the milestone. They set up a camera on a tripod, aimed at the point where they expected the plane to leave the launch rail, and asked John T. Daniels, a member of the local lifesaving crew, to squeeze the shutter at the right moment. He had never used a camera before. The resulting photograph, showing the Flyer just off the ground with Wilbur running alongside, became one of the most reproduced images in history.
The flight itself was almost anticlimactic: 120 feet, barely longer than the wingspan of a modern jetliner, at a height a person could touch while standing. But the brothers flew three more times that day, alternating pilots, and the fourth flight carried Wilbur 852 feet in 59 seconds before a gust damaged the machine beyond that day's repair. They sent their father a telegram that misspelled Orville's name but got the essential facts right, and asked that word be given to the press "but do not have it published." A local paper ran a wildly inaccurate account anyway; the world took years to fully grasp what had happened on that windswept beach.