After 2,000 years of unsuccessful efforts by humans to fly, the Wright brothers developed successful means to control their gasoline engine powered biplane aircraft in 1903. Orville and Wilbur thus provided the controls needed for the first 100 years of flight.
Through the first World War and the 1920s plane design developed slowly. Change came faster in the 1930s and '40s with metal monoplanes, better engines, propellers, streamlining and wing designs and has gone on to jet engines, supersonic speeds and stealth technology.
Recently the Smithsonian's "Air and Space" magazine named Gen. Jimmy Doolittle the number one pilot of the first 100 years for his developments and achievements. He flew in the first World War, stayed in the Army Air Corps, flew with Gen. Billy Mitchell's biplane bombers that sank a captured World War I battleship in 1923 as Japanese observers watched, got a doctor's degree in aeronautical engineering at MIT in 1926, made the first blind flight in 1929 using only basic instruments, which paved the way for safe flying in bad weather, won air races and set speed records in land and sea planes, and became known as the master of calculated risks in flying.