A history of flight lesson

Seth Shulman, in Technology Review, writes about The Flight that Tamed the Skies. In recounting early aviation pioneers, he names:

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....

Great stuff, if you're into the "pioneer days" of early aviation. Also makes the point that the person who does something first is seldom the one to actually develop a technology, to demonstrate what it's really capable of. The Wright Brothers might have proven the concept of powered flight, but Glenn Curtiss demonstrated what could be done with it.