The Wright brothers' first powered flight at Kitty Hawk in December 1903, Orville at the controls and Wilbur running beside
The first powered flight, Kitty Hawk, 17 December 1903
Marked Paris

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Learning to fly

People first went up in a hot-air balloon in Paris in 1783. In 1903 the Wright brothers made the first powered aeroplane flights, and within a lifetime jet airliners were carrying ordinary people across oceans.

Place
Paris · Kitty Hawk · Croydon · FarnboroughThe whole world
Laid out as
An inventionA new way of doing something, link by link: what came before, the breakthrough, and what it changed.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet
Image
John T. Daniels, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

BeforePeople travelled by land and sea only.

  1. IBalloons over Paris
  2. IICayley’s gliders
  3. IIIKitty Hawk, 1903
  4. IVPlanes at war
  5. VAmelia Earhart and Amy Johnson
  6. VIThe jet age

AfterAnyone could cross an ocean in a day.

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • The Montgolfier brothers
  • George Cayley
  • Orville and Wilbur Wright
  • Bessie Coleman
  • Amy Johnson
  • Frank Whittle

Objects

  • The Wright Flyer
  • Amy Johnson’s Jason

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1783 to 1969. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?