Being a born and bred son of Dayton, Ohio, I have vivid memories of traveling with my elementary school class to the historical village at Carillon park. There, among the various buildings from years past, I remember wandering to a tall, windowed storefront that our tour guide proudly stopped in front of.

“This,” he announced, “is the bicycle shop of Orville and Wilbur Wright. They designed and built their wildly successful bicycles in the front of the shop, but in the back room an even greater invention was taking shape. The world’s first heavier-than-air, powered, flying machine.”

And the story took on grandiose proportions from there. In a gush of nostalgia he explained how long it took them to build it, the materials used during its construction, and the methods for packing and shipping it in various crates to the North Carolina shores.

The story is one you just don’t forget. The two brothers were inseparable and used no outside financing, only the profits from the bicycle shop. Self-made men, OHIO men, who displayed that kind of rugged independence and brilliance which crowned the apex of America’s gilded age.

But don’t forget where it all really started; that little bicycle shop in Dayton, OH circa 1899-1902.

So why, you might ask, does every stupid license plate affixed to the back of cars registered in North Carolina have a drawing of the Wright Brothers’ flying machine and the slogan, “First in Flight” scrawled underneath?

Why, indeed.

It galls me to no end, every time I see one. As if the fact that the Wright’s flight tests were in their airspace with some coastal Carolina sand dunes somehow justifies the state’s place in the pantheon of aviation? No, the Wrights basically were looking at a variety of variables they needed to successfully test their machine. Based on extensive calculations and estimates of weight ratios, they anticipated needing winds in excess of 17 mph to gain the necessary lift for sustained flight. On top of that, they knew that turbulence and pilot error would probably produce a variety of sketchy scenarios where a softer landing would be preferable, and sand dunes along a windy coastline were the best scenario for both of these necessities.

While North Carolina’s gusty Outer Banks fit the bill in theory (according to research done by David McCullough in his fantastic book, The Wright Brothers), in reality the Kitty Hawk dunes were anything but welcoming for the Wright brothers and their flying machine. McCullough describes Wilbur’s harrowing  cross-country journey by train and the trip’s final leg  astride the rear seat of a leaky fisherman’s dinghy as merely the first of many trials offered up by the North Carolina coast. Upon arrival, the inhabitants welcomed him, but found his plans for aviation testing on their beaches to be evidence more of a cracked mind than of some grand vision beyond its time. One local, a William Tate, gladly offered any assistance he could, but not many others felt called to such levels of hospitality.

At various times the weather and the dune’s indigenous life conspired to completely ground the brothers’ plans. In writing about these early tests years later, Wilbur described the windswept beaches of Kitty Hawk as, “like the Sahara, or what I imagine the Sahara to be.” In a letter written during his first journey to the coastline he wrote, “We came down here for wind and sand, and we have got them. . . . The sand is the greatest thing in Kitty Hawk, and soon will be the only thing.” (Letter home, Orville Wright, October 1900)

Beyond this, the thing that almost caused the brothers to turn back from their plans was an avian strike force, whichseemed intent on sucking the life right out of them. “They [the mosquitoes] chewed us clear through our underwear and socks. Lumps began swelling up all over my body like hen’s eggs. . . . Misery! Misery!”  –Orville Wright, July 1901.

The swarms were so terrible, that they spent entire days huddled underneath blankets and mosquito netting, praying the plague of insects would soon disperse.

Hardly sounds like an inviting landscape.

The truth of the matter is, even though Kitty Hawk was the location where the Wright’s successfully tested their flying machines (the various iterations of the Glider were tested during 1901, 1902 and 1903; while the actual powered Flyer was successfully flown in 1903, 1904 and 1905), its incipient weather and hordes of man-eating bugs hardly give the state any right to claim even a scrap of historical accolade for aiding the Ohio brothers’ attempts at manned flight. North Carolina’s contribution was basically a gusty wind (which you’d have a tough time claiming state ownership of) and a pillowy landscape to fail on.  Whoopity-do.

So how exactly did Ohio let North Carolina get away with what essentially comes off as revisionist history at its worst? Well, they didn’t actually. This dispute of which state deserved the right to claim itself as “the birthplace of aviation” was a bitter dispute for the last 60 years. Finally, in June of 2003 the question was taken to a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives, with an official final count of 378-3 in favor of handing Ohio the congressionally sanctioned “birthplace” moniker (the 3 nay-sayers were, as you might anticipate, the 3 representatives from North Carolina whose attitudes continue to gall). The Senate passed the resolution later that same day via a voice-vote, and with that North Carolina was forced to take the second-place slogan of “First in Flight”.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t still act like they have something special to brag about. Even with a congressional vote against them, that little license plate is constantly pushing the unknowing public into giving credit where none is due.

“Hey, daddy? That car from North Carolina has a picture of the Wright Brothers on it,” my son yelled from the back seat on a recent trip. “They must have been from North Carolina, huh?”

Boiling hot flames of sulfur and damnation rose in my heart, but I quietly explained, “No son, no they didn’t. They came from Ohio, actually. They just used the sand in North Carolina to smash their airplane into a couple of times. Nothing special, really.”

Nothing special, at all.