Field notes · Nº 14 2 min read Growth and ambition
In July 1969, a piece of the Wright Flyer went to the Moon.
Its first flight had lasted twelve seconds.
Two bicycle makers from Dayton built it. Neil Armstrong took a scrap of its wing the rest of the way.
I think of them whenever a beginning looks small.
Every great distance was once twelve seconds long.
Whose small beginning do you expect to travel furthest?
Going deeper
On 17 December 1903, near Kitty Hawk in North Carolina, Orville Wright lay at the controls of an aeroplane he and his brother Wilbur had made themselves. It flew for about twelve seconds and covered 120 feet, less than half the length of a football field. The brothers flew four times that day.
They were not a laboratory or a government programme. Since 1893 they had run a bicycle business in Dayton, Ohio, the Wright Cycle Company, and they built the parts of their aeroplanes in that shop. The machines were too big to assemble there, so the parts travelled as kits to the dunes where the brothers flew.
Sixty-five years later, on 20 July 1969, the lunar module Eagle landed on the Moon. In Neil Armstrong’s personal kit aboard it were a small piece of muslin from the left wing of the 1903 Flyer and a piece of wood from its propeller.
I love the shape of that story. Twelve seconds over sand, and then, within a single lifetime, a scrap of the same cloth resting on another world. Nobody on the beach that morning could have drawn the line between the two. The brothers did not need to. They needed only to make the first twelve seconds real.
Great beginnings rarely look great. They look short, homemade and easy to underestimate. What makes them great is the quality of the people inside them: their patience, their stubborn curiosity and their willingness to do the unglamorous work themselves. Those qualities do not stay inside the first attempt. They are carried forward by everyone who builds on it, and they compound in ways the founders never see.
That is why I find small beginnings so moving. Somewhere right now, two people are building something that flies for twelve seconds. Most of the world will not notice. Some day, a piece of it may travel further than anyone alive can imagine.
Every great distance was once twelve seconds long.
Sources
Smithsonian: The Wright brothers’ first flight · Biography: Wright brothers’ first flight · The Henry Ford: Wright Cycle Shop · University of Cincinnati: Armstrong brothers donate Wright Flyer relic · Dayton Daily News: Wright Flyer wing fabric taken to the Moon