At 10:35 a.m. on this date in 1903, for about 12 seconds, Orville Wright took the first sustained motorized aircraft flight at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina.

The Wright Brothers flew a total of four times that morning and afternoon. Orville and Wilbur took turns flying and they stopped for the day with a crash of the flyer from an altitude of about ten feet. That last flight covered 852 feet in 59 seconds.

Almost as important as the flights themselves was the fact that the brothers had five witnesses present. One of them, John T. Daniels, took the famous photo at the top of this article. Orville is the pilot in the photo, and Wilbur is running alongside.
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The Boston Tea Party took place on this date in 1773. Years of resistance against British colonial rule came to a head over an Act of Parliament from earlier in the year that was passed to force the colonies to purchase tea from the British East India Tea Company, which had a surplus of tea and was struggling.

The American colonists saw the point behind the Tea Act: Behave yourselves, Parliament appeared to be telling the them, and act like a part of the Empire.
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The Governor Malcolm Wilson Tappan Zee Bridge, which most people simply call the Tappan Zee Bridge, opened on this date in 1955.

At 16,000 feet long, it is the longest bridge in New York State, and it spans the Hudson River’s second-widest point for reasons of bureaucratic disagreements.

As one can see in the photo at top, the bridge offers a dramatic swoop of a structure across the river; a long approach over the water carries a driver gradually to a classic suspension bridge in the center of the river and a similar length ramp brings one to the other side.
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