The iconic photo of the Wright brothers' first flight was the photographer’s first

See a timeline of early flights, patent approvals and the birth of the Wright Company

The brothers’ most intense period of creativity and progress came between 1901 and 1910, when their work at Kitty Hawk culminated in the first powered flight. The pair, however, were not the most business-savvy, and they struggled to take financial advantage of their pioneering work in the field.

Watch a 1908 Wright Flyer demo with Wilbur and a passenger near Le Mans, France

One of the earliest filmed flights, this demonstration in France helped dispel doubts over the Wrights’ claims to powered, controlled flight. Such demos helped launch the pair to fame five years after their seminal flight in Kitty Hawk.

How did the Wright brothers invent the airplane?

This article explores the research processes that led Wilbur and Orville Wright to invent the airplane and includes photos and visualizations of their findings and inventions.

See shots of the Wright Flyer intact at the National Air and Space Museum

Since the museum’s opening in 1976, the wood-and-muslin plane has been available for public viewing with a model of Orville, the younger brother, lying on the plane’s mid-section.

Explore hundreds of the brother’s personal photographs of flights, family and dogs

Their estate offered 300 negatives to the Library of Congress in 1948 after Orville’s death, most of which were taken by the brothers between 1897 and 1928. The collection serves as a visual timeline of their adult lives.

The 1910 Wright Model B was the brother’s most successful aircraft

The model, built from 1910 to 1914, was the first designed to be constructed in bulk, with four built each month in 1911 and 1912. The two-seater was used in exhibition flights and training for some of the earliest uses of airplanes in military contexts.

Before their historic flight, the Wright brothers ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, where they built the world's first successful powered aircraft.

The public mostly doubted the Wrights’ flight claims for five years

Coverage of the pair’s success often described them as barely educated bike mechanics. They struggled to gain traction with the public. It took interest from French business leaders and the US Signal Corps to bring the pair into separate demonstrations of their planes.

The Wrights were inspired by a toy helicopter as kids

The pair tinkered with toys and dreamed of building a flying machine at a young age. Founders Podcast host David Senra read David McCullough's 2015 book on the duo and distilled key insights for leaders to take from their work and lives, focusing on their relentless resourcefulness.

Some claim the Wrights weren’t first in flight

Their scientific and engineering achievements aside, the Wrights’ claim to be first in flight is debated—and rejected—by some in the industry. Other early pioneers like Gustave Whitehead or Alberto Santos-Damonto are said to deserve the title.

Watch an amateur fly a 1902 Wright glider at the Kitty Hawk dunes

Billy Vaughan recreates the test flights of the Wright gliders in the exact location the brothers conducted them. He argues an October 1902 glider flight—not the December 1903 one—was the key innovative moment, implementing three-axis control. Host Baratunde rides a glider in perfect windy conditions in this re-creation.

The Wrights battled inventor Glenn Curtiss for market dominance, ultimately losing

Their 1903 flights were met with skepticism, and the pair were hesitant to conduct public demonstrations. By 1908, Curtiss developed his own airplane, successfully flying a mile in front of judges and winning the nation’s first pilot license. The Wrights sued for patent infringement, sparking a business war.

See rare Civil War photographs preserved by the National Archives

The Civil War was the first major American conflict documented by a camera, with its images distributed widely to the public. The National Archives' digital collection offers thousands of original Civil War images: portraits, battlefields, hospitals, and everyday life.

The Wright Flyer was an engineering breakthrough, and modern aircraft still use the same principles of flight.

Explore a timeline of advancements in American aviation

From the Wright brothers' flight of the first powered plane in 1903 near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to SpaceX's debut of the Falcon 9 rocket in 2010 with reusable boosters, this interactive shows off the technological evolution of flight, from mechanical propulsion to ballistic spaceflight. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

Famed historian David McCullough on five things to know about the Wrights

The bestselling author of popular, beloved histories on US presidents, engineering feats and disasters published a study of the Wrights in 2015. Here. he highlights five key facts to know about the brothers, including that their efforts were bootstrapped—meaning they paid for their work themselves with no outside investors.

Photography was invented by a romantic artist

The invention of photography changed the landscape of art forever. The first photographs were created by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a romantic era printmaker, by using light and chemistry to expand upon images produced by the earlier camera obscura.

A firsthand account from the AP photographer who captured 'The Falling Man'

On 9/11, AP photographer Richard Drew made one of the most indelible — and harrowing — images of the 21st century. Here's his account of the photo he captured.

Wilbur published key papers, gave speeches in the burgeoning aviation community

Much of the theoretical work is credited to Wilbur, whose scientific mind observed birds and early pioneers to discover the key problem to solve was control. This 1901 speech surveys the recent work in the field and showcases what the brothers worked on two years before their breakthrough flight.

The Wright brothers' sister hyped their work, and was the only one to attend college

Katharine Wright became the de facto household caretaker after their mother, Susan, died, when Katharine was 15. After graduating from Oberlin, Katharine took over household duties so her father and brothers could work. She promoted their work in the US and abroad.

Check out the most iconic images captured by Dorothea Lange, the American photographer known as one of the 20th-century's greatest social documentarians.

Using wind tunnels, the brothers corrected a centuries-old error used to measure lift

When their early gliders failed, the Wright brothers scrutinized inherited data analysis. Smeaton’s coefficient had been used to calculate the density of air (0.005) for centuries. The Wright’s data validation through the use of small, laboratory wind tunnels showed the correct number was 0.0033.

The Wrights’ patent battles delayed the development of aviation technology in the US

By the time World War I began in 1914, the US was lagging behind European powers in aviation. This stemmed primarily from wars over patents between the Wrights and competitor Glenn Curtiss. The pair argued their 1906 patent covered all mechanisms enabling lateral flight.

What Kitty Hawk looks like today, including a 60-foot memorial to the brothers

This short video surveys the flat, empty expanse near Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina’s barrier islands, highlighting the area’s attractive conditions for early flight. Also shown are the stone monument to the Wright’s and replica wooden shacks like the ones they lived in those fateful years.

The 'Miracle on the Hudson' showed heroism in the air and changed social media forever

On Jan. 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 lost both engines after hitting birds and was safely landed in the Hudson River. The event was a turning point for Twitter, as a photo and a tweet quickly spread—marking Twitter's rise as a real-time news source.

The first flight on Mars carried a piece of the Wright plane with it

In April 2021, the solar-powered helicopter Ingenuity—attached to NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover—flew in what became the first controlled flight on a planet other than Earth. Carried with it was a piece of fabric from the famous 1903 Wright Flyer, a symbol of Ingenuity’s continuation of the Wright tradition.

Dorothea Lange's iconic 'Migrant Mother' photo was just one image of many she captured of the woman with her children.

Hubble's first light test produced an underwhelming photograph

This test represents the first time light travels entirely through an observatory's optical system and reaches its detectors, producing an image. Although the telescope's warped mirror was not discovered and announced until a month after first light, the issue was not responsible for the simplicity of the first light image.

The story behind the iconic flag-raising photo on Iwo Jima (1945)

The iconic image captured by AP photographer Joe Rosenthal went viral, as far as it could in the 1940s, showing six marines raising a flag atop Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi. The shot was used for public relations by the military, but it would later be shrouded by controversy when it was revealed it was the second flag raising that day, inviting accusations it was staged.

AP Photos: 20 images documenting the enormity of 9/11

The Associated Press shares 20 photographers’ frames from Sept. 11, 2001, when hijackers crashed commercial planes into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

During the Great Depression, the US government used photography to document rural poverty.

The pair began their aviation research by studying the 'mechanics' of birds

Taking inspiration from gliding pioneer Otto Lilienthal—whose gliders resembled the wings of birds—Wilbur took to observing birds to understand how they do it, in order to solve the problem of flight. This opening episode on the brothers explores their lives and accomplishments.

Kitty Hawk’s wide space, isolation and winds were ideal for flight experiments

North Carolina’s Outer Banks at the turn of the 20th century were not the summer resort destinations they are today. The brothers sought privacy as they toyed with their aviation designs, camping in Kill Devil Hills and using its sand dunes as launch points for early glider designs.

Some of the oldest photographs in the world

Scholar and artist Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey ventured around the Mediterranean with some of the earliest photographic equipment in tow. He captured hundreds of images during his tour of Rome, Venice, Cairo, and more, in what would become...

The Flyer sat in a shed for 13 years behind the brothers’ Dayton bike shop

While the wood is the same used in the 1903 flight, the muslin has been replaced twice. After laying forgotten in sheds, the vehicle eventually took on national importance. However, the Smithsonian Institution did not recognize it until the 1940s, after it spent time at the Science Museum in London.

See nine airplane models that transformed aviation

This visual guide jumps over the dawn of modern air travel and begins with the open-cockpit biplane flown by the first scheduled airline, the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

A photographer's long-lost collection of images of mothers

Professional photographer Ken Heyman discovered a 50-year-old box of photos labeled "Mothers" in his storage unit, with images depicting various mothers with their children in touching, candid scenes. Check out the finest of the group with this gallery.

How a Harlem Renaissance poet teamed up with a Wright brother

Paul Laurence Dunbar is one of the most influential poets from the Harlem Renaissance, a loose collection of Black artists who redefined American literature in the early 20th century. He was also an entrepreneur. He founded a short-lived newspaper, the Dayton Tattler, alongside Orville Wright, one of the famous Wright Brothers who pioneered aviation. This article explores how their friendship defied the societal norms of the time and led to a pioneering publication.

The first scientifically useful photograph of a total solar eclipse was taken in Königsberg, Prussia, on July 28, 1851, using a silver-coated copper plate with a light-sensitive chemical layer.

A 94-year-old stumbles upon a photo of herself from 1947 at an airport

Earlier this year, Gwendolyn Bruhn, who worked for Hawaiian Airlines in the 1940s, spotted herself in a photo blown up on an airport wall. Here's her story.

Rockwell's first full-time magazine job was for Boys' Life

After graduating from the Art Students League of New York, Rockwell found work illustrating for Boys’ Life, the magazine of the Boy Scouts of America. He went on to create images for over 50 magazine covers and to design the organization’s annual calendars.

Their 1901 Wind Tunnel system revolutionized the study of aeronautics

Only the second to be built in the US, the wind tunnel allowed the brothers to study how air moves around more than 200 different wing shapes. This data helped them refine a key math equation, long held as the standard, that had been based only on one wing shape.

A gallery of shots taken during the lunar flyby of Artemis 2

On April 6, 2026, the four-person Artemis 2 crew took photos of "earthset" and "earthrise" from the Orion spacecraft window during their lunar flyby. It was the first time humans had flown around the moon in over 50 years.

View the first photos ever taken from the Martian surface, courtesy of NASA's Viking Project.

Hear the story behind 11 iconic Super Bowl photos, told by the photographer who shot them

Sports Illustrated legend Walter Iooss Jr. revisits 11 unforgettable Super Bowl images—including Namath, Montana, and Taylor—explaining how light, access, and timing captured moments that defined the game’s visual history.

Stephen Wilkes' day-to-night panoramas

Renowned US photographer Stephen Wilkes creates distilled time-lapses of cityscapes and landscapes using a novel form: He takes roughly 1,500 images over 30 hours of the same shot, later layering them together to reveal the scene's shift from day to...

Photobombing bird nabs best wedding photo of the year

Just as groom-to-be started in on his vows in the beautiful setting of wild Whistler, Canada, a curious bird alighted upon his dear love's head, and photographer Tara Lilly captured what would become the year's best wedding photograph. See the shot and read the story here.

'Behind the Gare St. Lazare' (1932) famously froze a moment of spontaneity

Henri Cartier-Bresson's photo of a man jumping over a puddle inspired generations of future street photographers. Cartier-Bresson was known for capturing "decisive moments," as he called them.

Photographer Mathieu Stern found a little girl's 120-year-old time capsule containing two glass plate negatives in his family home, and developed the photos, unveiling images of the child's pets.

The crew of Artemis II captured a photograph of Earth setting as they orbited the moon

On April 6, 2026, the Artemis II astronauts captured a striking image of Earth setting as their spacecraft orbited the Moon, echoing the iconic Earthrise photo taken by Apollo 8's Bill Anders 58 years earlier.