A Great Human Accomplishment by. Stephen A. Foster

From a distance, you can see a HUGE monument on the largest hill in the area; it is called Kill Devil Hill. With, the memorial dedicated to one of human-kinds greatest achievements, manned flight.
The great achievement of manned flight was accomplished by two Ohio bicycle engineers, named Orville and Wilbur Wright. By watching the birds they were able to figure out that by warping their wings the birds were able to glide and fly across the sky. They ended up using these ideas on small kites. When it worked really well, they figured that they could create a larger, manned glider. So they found out about this area in North Carolina that was flat, windy, and had a lot of space. They ended up making a base camp there at a place called Kill Devil Hill. They did much research there and ended up completing a glider, not big enough to carry a man, but big enough to try to fly. It ended up working really well, so from there they were extremely motivated to continue to fly.
In the next 8 years they built manned gliders of which some worked and some did not. To get them at the right speed to take a person into the air, they built a track wrapping around Kill Devil Hill to gain enough speed to fly. When they weren’t able to go too far, they figured that they could build an engine to create more speed to fly them further. The engine, through trial and error, ended up working. They got it going about 14 miles per hour, and made it 400+ feet. I think that is truly amazing.
Later on they kept building, better and better airplanes, to fly and sell. They ended up getting a contract to sell to the United States Army Signal Corp, and later a contract to build for France.
When we visited the Kill Devil Hill National Historical Site, I truly was interested in how the Wright Brothers were able to accomplish these feats and throw the world into the age of flight.