WRIGHT BROTHERS Orville and Wilbur, pioneers of human flight and air travel, took hundreds of images of their efforts to build the world’s first successful airplane.
In 1948, the brothers donated a collection of around 300 glass plate negatives to the US Library of Congress for its archives. Many of the images were captured by the brothers themselves between 1897 and 1928.
Here’s a selection of some of the photographs they, their friends and their family took of their experiments with various flying machines – including the crashes and disasters that happened along the journey to that first successful flight near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903:
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