The World in 1903 the year a machine left the ground

That first flight at Kitty Hawk covered 120 feet. A jumbo jet's wings are wider than that, so the whole trip would have fitted inside one modern airliner's shadow.

Life back then

Long distance meant a letter or a walk to the telegraph office, where you paid by the word and learned to write like a miser. Under one home in ten had a telephone, and calling the next state cost more than a day's wages. The post office carried the country's conversation instead, with two or three deliveries a day on city streets and Rural Free Delivery wagons at last reaching farms that used to drive into town for their mail. Anything further took a ship. A letter posted in London reached Sydney in about five weeks, so families split by the sea wrote knowing the answer was two months away.

The year in 8 events

• 🐘Jan 1 A huge parade in Delhi marks Edward VII as Emperor of India. Indian princes ride in on elephants and the show runs for two weeks.
• 🕯️Apr 19 A mob attacks the Jewish quarter of Kishinev in the Russian empire. Dozens are killed and thousands leave the country.
• 🚗Jun 16 The Ford Motor Company is founded in Detroit.
• 🚴Jul 1 The first Tour de France sets off from Paris. Sixty riders start and twenty one finish.
• 🌍Nov 3 Panama declares independence from Colombia.
• 🏅Dec 10 Marie and Pierre Curie share the Nobel Prize for physics with Henri Becquerel. She is the first woman to win one.
• ✈️Dec 17 Orville Wright flies a powered aeroplane for twelve seconds at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
• 🕯️Dec 30 A fire at the Iroquois Theatre in Chicago kills about six hundred people.

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