The great aviators were men of deeds, but their words have outlasted the engines they flew. In the pale dawn of 17 December 1903, Orville Wright sat at Kitty Hawk and wrote in his diary with the calm of a scientist: "The wind, according to our anemometers at this time, was blowing a little over 20 miles... corrected 27 miles according to the Government anemometer at Kitty Hawk." It is the plainspoken entry of a man who has just changed the world and knows it.

His brother Wilbur, in an address to the Western Society of Engineers in 1901, gave voice to the ancient yearning that drove them both: "The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who... looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space... on the infinite highway of the air."

Three decades later, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry—airline pilot, poet, and vanished sentinel of the Mediterranean—saw from the cockpit what no earthbound traveler could: "The airplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth. For centuries, highways had been deceiving us. They shape themselves to man's needs and run from stream to stream."

And in May 1927, when Charles Lindbergh stood before the American Club of Paris and answered those who asked what good his flight had done, he borrowed the wisdom of Franklin: "Gentlemen, 132 years ago Benjamin Franklin was asked: 'What good is your balloon? What will it accomplish?' He replied: 'What good is a new born child?'... My answer is that I believe it is the forerunner of a great air service from America to France." The words remain, carved in time by men who believed the sky was not a limit, but a highway.