In 1900, the Wright brothers built their first glider. 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 country’s windiest places from the U.S. Weather Bureau and chose Kitty Hawk, an isolated fishing village on an island off the coast of North Carolina. With winds averaging 10 to 20 miles an hour and sandy soil 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.
