On the morning of 17 December 1903, on a stretch of windswept sand at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright lay flat on the lower wing of a 605-pound wooden biplane and held the controls as his brother Wilbur ran alongside to steady the machine. The engine fired. The aircraft lifted off the rail. At 10:35 in the morning, the Wright Flyer travelled 120 feet through the air at a top speed of 6.8 miles per hour, at an altitude of approximately 10 feet, for a total of 12 seconds. According to NASA’s own historical reference on the Kitty Hawk flights, it was the world’s first powered, controlled, sustained flight of a heavier-than-air machine. Five people witnessed it. One of them, John T. Daniels of the Kill Devil Hill Lifesaving Station, photographed it on instructions Orville had given him before the launch.
On the evening of 20 July 1969, at 10:56 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Neil Armstrong stepped from the ladder of the lunar module Eagle onto the surface of the Moon. The interval between the two events — between a 12-second hop a few feet off the sand at Kitty Hawk and a controlled descent onto an alien world 384,400 kilometres from Earth — was 66 years. The interval is shorter than a typical human lifespan. Many people who watched the moon landing live on television in July 1969 had been born before the Wright Brothers made their first flight, and could, if they happened to have lived in eastern North Carolina in late 1903, have been among the handful of original witnesses.
What the 66 years contained
The 66 years from 1903 to 1969 contain essentially the entire arc of modern aviation, condensed into a single human generation. The Wright Brothers’ first passenger flight came in 1908, five years after Kitty Hawk. The first scheduled commercial air service began between Tampa and St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1914. Alcock and Brown crossed the Atlantic non-stop in 1919. Charles Lindbergh did so solo in 1927. Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier over the California desert in 1947, 44 years after Kitty Hawk and 22 years before the moon landing. The Soviet Union placed Sputnik 1 in orbit in October 1957. Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space in April 1961, less than 58 years after Orville Wright’s first powered flight. John Glenn orbited Earth in 1962. Apollo 8 orbited the Moon in December 1968. Apollo 11 landed seven months after that.
The compression of the technological arc is what makes the 66 years so remarkable when laid out as a single sequence. The same generation of human engineers who first managed to keep a 605-pound wooden biplane in the air for 12 seconds were, by the end of their working lives, designing the systems that would eventually place human beings on another world. Some of the same individuals lived through both events as adults. Neil Armstrong himself was born in 1930, 27 years after Kitty Hawk and 39 years before Tranquility Base. He grew up in Ohio, the same state where the Wright Brothers had run their bicycle shop and built their experimental aircraft.
What Armstrong carried with him
Armstrong’s awareness of the historical compression is documented in his personal effects on the Apollo 11 mission. According to TIME magazine’s 2018 profile of Armstrong’s connection to the Wright Brothers, he had been a self-described “devotee” of the Wright Brothers since boyhood, had read extensively about their early experiments, and had taken a particular interest in carrying physical artifacts of the 1903 flight with him to the Moon. Through an arrangement with the US Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio — the institution that holds many of the original Wright Brothers’ materials — Armstrong was given two small fragments of the 1903 Flyer to take aboard Apollo 11.
The first was a 1.25-square-inch piece of muslin fabric cut from the left wing of the original aircraft. The second was a small piece of spruce wood taken from the left propeller, approximately 30 by 7 millimetres in size. Armstrong placed both fragments inside his “personal preference kit,” the small bag of personal items that each Apollo astronaut was allowed to bring on the mission. According to a History Facts reference summarising the Apollo 11 Wright Flyer fragments, Armstrong was not content to simply have the artifacts ride along inside his personal kit in the lunar module. He transferred them to a pocket inside his spacesuit and carried them out of the lunar module with him onto the surface of the Moon. The wood from the propeller of the world’s first powered aircraft, in other words, was carried onto the surface of the Moon by a man who had walked there on foot.
What happened to the fragments afterward
The Wright Flyer artifacts returned to Earth with Apollo 11 in late July 1969, were recovered along with the astronauts and the rest of the mission’s contents, and were eventually divided between the Smithsonian, the US Air Force Museum, and Armstrong himself. The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum holds a commemorative plaque, transferred to it from the Air Force Museum in 1972, that contains the original Wright Flyer fragments that flew on Apollo 11. According to the Smithsonian’s catalogue record for the plaque, the artifact commemorates “two of humankind’s greatest flight achievements: the first powered, controlled flight of the Wright brothers in December 1903 and the first human lunar landing (Apollo 11) in July 1969.” The plaque sits in the museum’s collection at the National Mall in Washington, DC.
A separate portion of the Wright Flyer fragments stayed in Armstrong’s personal possession, with documentation he signed certifying that the materials had been on Apollo 11. The certification, dated 26 January 1970, reads: “I certify that the wooden and fabric materials provided by the Air Force Museum were placed aboard Apollo XI and carried to the surface of the moon by the lunar module ‘Eagle’ on mankind’s first lunar landing, July 20, 1969.” Some of these personal fragments were sold at the Heritage Auctions sales of the Armstrong Family Collection in 2018 and 2019, fetching prices in the six figures for individual postage-stamp-sized pieces of muslin or short segments of propeller wood. The auction catalogues identify each item as having been flown twice: once on 17 December 1903 at Kitty Hawk, and once on 20 July 1969 at Tranquility Base.
The arc in human terms
The 66-year arc has a few particular human dimensions worth noting. Sarah Knauss, who was the world’s oldest verified person at the time of her death in 1999 at the age of 119, was 23 years old when the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk and 88 when Armstrong walked on the Moon. She watched both events as an adult. She was not alone. The cohort of Americans born in the 1880s and 1890s, of whom several hundred thousand were still alive in 1969, witnessed within a single lifetime the entire arc from the first 12 seconds of powered flight to the first human footprint on another world. The pace of the technological development they lived through has, with the partial exception of computing, not been matched by any subsequent generation.
Armstrong’s gesture in carrying the Wright Flyer fragments was a quiet acknowledgement of this compression. He was not making a public statement. The fragments were not visible to the cameras during the EVA. The Smithsonian plaque containing them was not announced until after the mission’s return. Armstrong simply carried, in his suit pocket, a small piece of the propeller from the first aircraft that had ever flown, and walked it across a quarter of a million miles of empty space and a few metres of lunar regolith. The wood and fabric that had carried Orville Wright 120 feet in 12 seconds in 1903 came to rest, briefly, on the surface of the Moon in 1969, in the hand of an Ohio engineer who had grown up reading about the Wright Brothers and who had spent his career, one might say, finishing what they had started.
