Anniversary

Dec. 17, 1923 marked the 20th anniversary of the airplane. On the same day of the year 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright, sons of a clergyman of Dayton, O., in a curious boxlike machine made largely of wood, wire and canvas, propelled by a small gasoline engine, rose from a giant sand dune at Kitty Hawk, N. C, and made an epochal flight of 12 seconds. Taking the air a second time, they flew 852 feet in 59 seconds. The young inventors had braved the derision of all their neighbors, the scepticism of the world at large to create the first airplane. And the 266 miles an hour achieved by Lieut. A. J. Williams in the year 1923 (TIME, Nov. 12) is but a logical development of the work of these pioneers.