7. A woman flew a motorized aircraft before the Wright brothers
On June 27, 1903, Aida de Acosta, a 19 year old American socialite and veteran of three lessons flying dirigibles, became the first woman to fly a powered flight vehicle solo. She piloted the dirigible “Number 9” from Paris to the Chateau de Bagatelle escorted by the vessel’s owner, who rode along on a bicycle a few hundred feet below. Certain that her daring had ruined her eligibility for marriage, as no respectable young man would consider wedlock with such an independent minded woman, her parents undertook to squash the story. Nonetheless the story came out, and despite her parents’ fears Acosta eventually married, had two children, divorced, remarried and divorced again. She eventually became the director of the first eye bank in the United States, a victim of glaucoma herself.
In December of the same year a pair of brothers from Dayton, Ohio, culminated years of experimentation by flying a heavier than air vehicle of their own design, the first Wright Flyer. After a burst of press coverage, much of which was cynical, the brothers retreated to a prairie near Dayton to develop both their airplane and the skills required of a pilot, in effect learning to fly. The combination of Aida’s parent’s hushing up her story and the Wright’s use of the press to develop interest in their work for commercial purposes led to Acosta’s story being largely lost to history. Nonetheless it is true that an American woman flew a powered aircraft nearly six months before the Wright Brothers took to the air at Kitty Hawk, an event forgotten by history but easily verified in the historical record.