Next year marks the centennial of flight-100 years since the December day in Kitty Hawk, NC, when the Wright brothers etched themselves so deeply into our collective consciousness. No doubt a good deal of hoopla will be whipped up about those two bicycle builders and their flight that changed America. But what the history books leave out is that the highly secretive Wright brothers refused to publicly demonstrate their airplane for four and a half years after that now legendary 12-second, 37-meter hop. By the time they revealed their machine, a number of other inventors already had airplanes flying.

One of them was Glenn Hammond Curtiss, who in the spring of 1910 completed a 243-kilometer public flight along the Hudson River from Albany, NY, to Manhattan. Curtiss's feat-the first true cross-country flight in the United States-was a technological tour de force. Not only was it by far the longest flight yet attempted in the United States, but it meant traveling over unpredictable terrain with virtually unknown wind and weather hazards-quite a different matter from the fair-weather demonstration laps around airfields that characterized most of the previous flights. Hundreds of thousands of people showed up to watch Curtiss's flight, and the New York Times devoted no less than six full pages of text and photos to the occasion-the most space the newspaper had ever allotted a single news event.

Glenn Curtiss, largely forgotten today, teaches us an important lesson with implications far beyond aviation history about how technology evolves and how its development is remembered. We're often obsessed with those, like the Wright brothers, who are first to cross a technological threshold. As important as those progenitors are, though, new technologies often take time to find their niches. Determining their ultimate uses-and their markets-is rarely an easy task. It can take daring to demonstrate a new capability that is well beyond the public's imagination. It surely takes dedication, to persevere against the status quo. And it almost always takes vision.

Glenn Curtiss combined all these traits. He arguably did more to make the modern airplane a reality than anyone before or since. While his formal education ended at the eighth grade, Curtiss's mechanical genius resulted in some 500 groundbreaking innovations, including many features still incorporated in airplanes today-from wing flaps to retractable landing gear. (By contrast, none of the Wrights' aeronautical designs have stood the test of time. Most were obsolete by as early as 1912.) But Curtiss's contributions weren't limited to mechanical insights.