Word: skies
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Wilbur and Orville Wright were two brothers from the heartland of America with a vision as sweeping as the sky and a practicality as down-to-earth as the Wright Cycle Co., the bicycle business they founded in Dayton, Ohio, in 1892. But while there were countless bicycle shops in turn-of-the-century America, in only one were wings being built as well as wheels. When the Wright brothers finally realized their vision of powered human flight in 1903, they made the world a forever smaller place. I've been to Kitty Hawk, N.C., and seen where the brothers...
When published aeronautical data turned out to be unreliable, the Wright brothers built their own wind tunnel to test airfoils and measure empirically how to lift a flying machine into the sky. They were the first to discover that a long, narrow wing shape was the ideal architecture of flight. They figured out how to move the vehicle freely, not just across land, but up and down on a cushion of air. They built a forward elevator to control the pitch of their craft as it nosed up and down. They fashioned a pair of twin rudders in back...
...development of writing, for their invention effectively became the World Wide Web of that era, bringing people, languages, ideas and values together. It also ushered in an age of globalization, as the world's flight paths became the superhighways of an emerging international economy. Those superhighways of the sky not only revolutionized international business; they also opened up isolated economies, carried the cause of democracy around the world and broke down every kind of political barrier. And they set travelers on a path that would eventually lead beyond Earth's atmosphere...
...aunt Effie's nearby farm. He set up the missile in a field, then summoned an assistant, who lit its fuse with a blowtorch attached to a long stick. For an instant the rocket did nothing at all, then suddenly it leaped from the ground and screamed into the sky at 60 m.p.h. Climbing to an altitude of 41 ft., it arced over, plummeted earthward and slammed into a frozen cabbage patch 184 ft. away. The entire flight lasted just 2 1/2 sec.--but that was 2 1/2 sec. longer than any liquid-fueled rocket had ever managed...
...began: the Big Bang. At the beginning, it is said, there was literally nothing ("the void" of Genesis), not even space. Then there came into being a tiny speck of superheated space that contained enough energy to create all the stars and galaxies that fill the sky-with enough left over to drive the expansion of the universe ever since...