ABSTRACT
Introduction The emergence and development of aviation in the years between 1903 and 1927 undoubtedly marked one of the major transformations of the early twentieth century. In less than a generation, powered flight rapidly advanced from the first tentative experiments of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to Charles Lindbergh’s epoch-shifting crossing of the Atlantic. Yet early aviation achievements did more than transform the technological landscape of the modern world, heralding a new age of movement and speed. They also facilitated a significant transformation within the broader field of cultural production. Thus while technicians and designers were striving to develop the capabilities of the earliest airplanes, writers and artists were similarly striving to find new ways to articulate, in both word and image, the shifts in consciousness brought about by flight.
