WELCOME TO

As millions watched on television, one of the most dramatic moments in human history took place some 235,000 miles away.The hatch of the Apollo 11 lunar module opened. Commander Neil A. Armstrong, dressed in a bulky space suit, slowly climbed down a ladder. Finally, his boot touched the surface of the moon."That's one small step for a man," he said, "one giant leap for mankind."

Four days earlier, on July 16, 1969, a giant Saturn Vrocket, as tall as a 28-story building, had been launched from Cape Kennedy in Florida. Atop the rocket was the Apollo 11 spacecraft carrying three American astronauts: Neil armstrong, Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., and Michael Collins. The three-stage rocket provided the thrust to propel the spacecraft to the moon. Apollo 11 then took over, using its own engine to go into orbit around the moon.

Then on July 20, the Apollo 11's spider-legged lunar module separated from the rest of the spacecraft and carried Armstrong and Aldrin to a flat area on the moon's surface. The landing was smooth. For the first time, humans had landed on the moon. A dream as old as humanity had been achieved.

On the morning of December 17, 1903, on the windy dunes at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina, Orville Wright made the first manned and powered flight.

Orville and his brother Wilbur operated a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. They had been dreaming about flying since the 1890's. they were not trained scientists or engineers, but they made a scientific study of the problems of flight. They built and tested gliders to understand the principles of flying. They created a wind tunnel in the bicycle shop to test wing designs, and they studied propeller designs and control mechanisms. Their machinist built a 12-horsepower gasoline engine for them.By 1903, the brothers had built a twin-winged airplane, the Flyer, and they felt confident it would fly.

At kitty Hawk, they constructed a wooden track down a hill to provide a smooth surface for takeoff. With Orville at the controls, Wilbur guided the plane down the track, and it bounded into the air. After covering 40 yards in 12 seconds, it landed gently in the sand. Before the day was out, the brothers had made three more flights, one of which lasted almost a minute. Man, at last, had learned to fly.

In 1876, the United States was 100 years nold. To celebrate the occasion, a Centennial Exposition was held in Philadelphia. There, in Machinery Hall, was a display of inventions. At one end of the hall, a young man named Alexander Graham Bell spoke into an instrument attached to a wire. At the other end of the hall, an official heard Bell's voice through a second instrument. "It talks!" he exclaimed. Here was proof that the human voice could be carried through a wire. Bell called his invention the telephone.

Alexander Graham Bell was a scientist and inventor who devoted much of his life to teaching the deaf. Bell, whose mother was deaf, wanted to find a way for people to learn to speak even though they could not hear. This effort led him to experiment with transmitting the human voice by electric impulses through a wire. In 1875, he began his experiments, and in 1876 he obtained the first patent on his telephone. Bell went on to make other discoveries that led to important improvements of the telegraph, the phonograph, and machines for medical care. Although the telephone is one of history's most useful inventions, Bell wanted to be remembered above all as "a teacher of the deaf."