• Short Prose

• Type: Short Story

• Found in: Danger! and other stories (Short Story Collection)
• Found in: Tales of Terror and Mystery (Short Story Collection)

The Horror of the Heights is a 1913 short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published less than ten years after Wilbur and Orville Wright flew the first powered aircraft south of Kitty Hawk on 17 December 1903. A work of fiction set more than twenty years after the first flight, the tale describes technical advances and achievements in aviation that would not be achieved in ten or more years. Aviation was a foolhardy sport in 1913, the typical aircraft was a wire-braced, wood-and-fabric biplane that was rarely flown higher than a few thousand feet above the ground. - AsNotedIn

• Theme Group: Early Aviation

Places

• Berwick St John, Wiltshire I saw the Bristol Channel beneath me as I broke from the clouds, but, having still some petrol in my tank, I got twenty miles inland before I found myself stranded in a field half a mile from the village of Ashcombe.
• Devizes, Wiltshire He had four private aeroplanes in his hangars near Devizes, and is said to have made no fewer than one hundred and seventy ascents in the course of last year.
• Withyham, East Sussex The Joyce-Armstrong Fragment was found in the field which is called Lower Haycock, lying one mile to the westward of the village of Withyham, upon the Kent and Sussex border.
• Wright Brothers National Memorial, Kill Devil Hills Aeroplaning has been with us now for more than twenty years, and one might well ask: Why should this peril be only revealing itself in our day?