When did the world shrink? When did the vast distances between continents fall away like sheer cliffs, leaving behind a much smaller planet? The aviation-savvy reader might choose a specific date, Dec. 17, 1903, on the sand dunes at Kitty Hawk with the Wright brothers — the dawn of the age of the airplane. Today, commercial air travel enables us to reach any point in the world from any other in a span of hours. The airplane, one of the most important and celebrated inventions in the history of mankind, has forever transformed how humans move about the planet.
But Dec. 17, 1903, isn’t the date the world shrank. The transformation actually happened years earlier.
