In a letter to Octave Chanute, dated May 13, 1900, Wilbur noted: "For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money, if not my life. . . . My general ideas of the subject are similar to those held by most practical experimenters, to wit; that what is chiefly needed is skill rather than machinery. . . . "

The brothers chose the Outer Banks of North Carolina for their experiments because they decided, from the replies they got from various postmasters, that it would have the most favorable wind conditions.

Beginning in 1900, they spent several weeks each year at Kitty Hawk, at first testing gliders, and then finally their motorized machine.

Following that first successful flight, they continued to work on and perfect their design. It took them seven years to come up with a practical design.

In 1912, Wilbur died of typhoid fever; he was 45. Orville built an aeronautics laboratory and returned to inventing. He died in 1948 at the age of 76.

The legacy of Kitty Hawk has obviously been far-reaching. And from the very first, it was embraced in a big way by the people of Utah.

"Aviation," proclaimed an ad in the Deseret News on Feb. 10, 1911, "the word that charms the multitude — that thrills the heart — that crowds the grand stand. It's the latest innovation in sportsdom and one that appeals to every nation."

What the ad called "the first great aviation meet for Utah" took place at Barrington Park on Feb. 11-13 and attracted attention all over the country. Over the three-day period, some 10,000 people paid $1 each to view the exploits of such famous fliers as Glen H. Curtiss, who had startled the world by taking off and landing on water in an airplane; Eugene B. Ely, who had had a harrowing experience when he attempted the first flight from Chicago to New York (a piece of chewing gum had clogged a gas vent, forcing him to land every 20 minutes); and stunt-flier Charles S. Willard.

The only thing that detracted from the success of the show was that local aviator Clarence Walker could not get his biplane in the air, but, according to the Deseret News, "he gave the immense crowd, which swarmed over the flying field, a close inspection of a machine in motion." All in all, said the paper, the show kept huge crowds in a "continual state of wonder."

From the first, Salt Lakers seemed to have an uncommon interest in flight. They had followed closely the early experiments and later developments.

On Aug. 6, 1909, readers of the Deseret News got a close secondhand look at planes when local attorney Joel Nibley returned from a trip to the East and brought back some "historic souvenirs in the form of Kodak pictures taken by himself of the flight of Orville Wright recently at Ft. Meyer, Va." The two pictures showed Orville bringing his airplane out of a shed and flying at 15 miles per hour.