One hundred years ago today, along the shores of North Carolina, two shy but determined men changed the world forever, and in many ways they never had considered.
Wilbur and Orville Wright originally conceded the flying machine they invented might have some military application, but they saw this as limited to scouting the enemy from above. They never imagined the day would come when bombers rained horror on innocent civilians below or when an airplane would drop the world's first atomic weapons on two cities in Japan.
They probably didn't foresee how diseases would spread rapidly from one continent to the next. SARS, for example, was spread through air travel at a rate that threatened to paralyze health officials.
But neither did they fully comprehend the good. They likely didn't foresee the day when millions of people would fill airports around the globe on a daily basis, traveling thousands of miles safely in a few hours without a second thought — all while enjoying movies, complimentary beverages and a view from 30,000 feet that many travelers today find routine and boring. Nor did they likely envision flights to the moon or space shuttles orbiting Earth or the ability to send parcels overnight to anywhere else in the United States.
There is something quintessentially American about the story of the invention of flight. This is a nation that has always valued hard work and initiative over high birth and privilege. Its people have always valued the Abraham Lincolns who rose from poverty more than the ruling aristocracies of the world. The Wright brothers were humble bicycle mechanics who never attended college. Yet they kept at it, studying everyone who had tried before them and learning bit by bit until they found a design that worked. They triumphed where others failed because they believed the old adage that great discoveries are nearly all due to perspiration, added to a dash of inspiration.
And what they discovered, just as with virtually any other breakthrough from fire to the splitting of the atom, can be used for good or for evil. The worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, after all, took advantage of the Wrights' discovery.
The good news, and the thing that ought to give inventors and scientists hope, is that the airplane has been used mostly, and widely, to improve lives everywhere. More people see it as a useful tool than as something to fear.
A century ago, the world was coming to the end of an incredible period of invention. Virtually every convenience of today's modern world was discovered or invented in the late 19th and early 20th century. Since then, improvements have mostly come because of innovative engineering and imagination.
But the spirit that led two brothers of modest means to solve the age-old mystery of flight is one that can thrive only in a free society that values individual initiative. So long as that spirit lives on, there is hope for the future.