Those Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machine!

On 17 December 1903, brilliant brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright accomplished what so many (including Leonardo da Vinci some 400 years before them) had only dreamed of: flying the first heavier-than-air machine. Exactly one-hundred years after this historic flight near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, USA, we now have space shuttles, space stations and spacecraft traveling through our solar system.

Did you know (as best as we can determine) that these great inventors were devout, Bible-believing Christians? (By the way, they lived and worked just 65 miles north of AiG-US in Dayton, Ohio.) They join so many inventors who drew inspiration from God’s world (e.g. the Wright brothers carefully studied bird flight when they designed their plane) and God’s Word while making their great discoveries.

Learn more about why these brothers had the “Wright stuff” when you read our article about them which originally appeared in AiG’s Creation magazine. Our December 2003 Creation magazine features the Wright brothers as well. See 100 Years of Airplanes—But These Weren’t the First Flying Machines!

* Editor’s note: The title of this brief web article is derived from a popular 1965 film “Those magnificent men in their flying machines,” which was about early flight and a fictional air race over the English Channel. An interesting sidebar is that one of the characters in the film (played by Red Skelton) was called “Neanderthal Man,” after the so-called “missing link” that was popular evidence for evolution during that era but which has now been dismissed as man’s supposed ape-like ancestor by almost all evolutionists [see the Neandertal section of our Q&A on Anthropology].