The Wright brothers built their first glider in 1900. It was a biplane, an aircraft with two sets of wings.
Now they needed a place with strong, steady winds to test it. They got a list of the windiest places in the country from the U.S. Weather Bureau, and chose Kitty Hawk, a fishing village on an island off the coast of North Carolina. It had winds that averaged 10 to 20 miles an hour and sandy soil that was soft enough for crash landings. It seemed perfect—and it was. Every year from 1900 through 1903, the Wrights went there to test their machines.
