The Ottoman state, founded around 1299, still existed when the Wright brothers made the first airplane flight: the sultanate was abolished only in 1922.
The events
- Osman I founds the Ottoman statec. 1299 · Söğüt. Around 1299 Osman I, leader of a Turkish beylik in Bithynia, became an independent ruler. The state he founded grew into the Ottoman Empire, which lasted more than six centuries.
- Wright brothers' first flight1903 · Kitty Hawk. On 17 December 1903 Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first controlled, sustained flight in a powered aeroplane. The first attempt lasted just 12 seconds but opened the age of aviation, which within half a century transformed war, travel and the world.
More amazing facts
- 1238 · 1242 The Battle on the Ice (1242) came just four years after work began on the Alhambra in Granada (1238).
- 1240 1240: in summer Alexander beat the Swedes on the Neva; in December Batu took Kiev.
- 1324 · 1325 In 1324, Mansa Musa gave away so much gold in Cairo that its value fell.
- 1337 · 1380 The Battle of Kulikovo (1380) fell in the middle of the Hundred Years' War, which had been raging for 43 years and had 73 more to go.
- 1347 · 1348 Ibn Battuta witnessed the Black Death: in 1348 he was in Damascus, where, he wrote, thousands were dying each day.
- 1377 · 1450 Korean monks printed the Jikji with movable metal type in 1377, some 70 years before Gutenberg's press.