It did not happen at Kitty Hawk.

If you have heard the story of the first flight, you have almost certainly heard that it happened at Kitty Hawk.

It did not. The Wright brothers camped and flew at Kill Devil Hills, four miles south of the small weather station town that put its name on the telegrams that night. Kitty Hawk had the telegraph office, and so Kitty Hawk got the dateline, and so a century of retellings put the airplane in the wrong place.

This journal begins with that correction because the archive is built on it. Every plate, every caption, and every garment in the collection starts from the record rather than the legend.