On December 17, 1903, on a windy stretch of beach in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, two obscure Ohio bicycle mechanics, Wilbur and Orville Wright, accomplished a feat that would make them legends: the first powered airplane flight.

Good thing they brought a camera.

Whether or not the brothers knew their years of experiments would finally come to fruition that day, they had the foresight to bring their trusty Korona-V, one of the finest and most expensive cameras of the day, to document it just in case. It captured single images on 5-by-7-inch glass negatives—cumbersome by later standards, but state-of-the-art at the time.

Orville set the camera up on a tripod about 30 feet from the end of the rail that the plane, optimistically named the “Flyer,” would travel on until it reached a sufficient speed to leave the ground. He asked a rescue team member at the local life-saving station, John T. Daniels, to squeeze the rubber bulb to activate the camera’s shutter at that precise moment.

“At the end of the track the Flyer lifted into the air and Daniels, who had never operated a camera until now, snapped the shutter to take what would be one of the most historic photographs of the century,” historian David McCullough writes in his 2015 biography The Wright Brothers.

But as famous as the photograph was to become, the world wouldn’t see it until 1908—nearly five years later—when it was finally published.

The Wright Brothers weren’t shy about trumpeting their accomplishments. On the day of the successful flight, they sent a telegram home to Dayton, Ohio, asking their family to notify the press. But photographs were another matter.

Numerous other inventors around the world were competing to get the first engine-powered plane into the air, and many were far better funded. Protecting their trade secrets wasn’t just a matter of pride for the brothers but one of survival. When they applied for a patent in 1903 for the revolutionary system they’d developed for controlling their plane, their attorney advised them to work in secrecy until it was granted. That didn’t happen until 1906.

So, while the Wrights sometimes welcomed newspaper reporters and others to witness their efforts from a respectful distance, they drew the line at photographers. It wouldn’t be until May 1908, McCullough writes, that “a photographer for Collier’s Weekly, James Hare, snapped what would be the first photograph ever published of a Wright Flyer in the air.” Hare made the photo surreptitiously, hiding with a group of reporters behind some nearby trees.

The now-famous 1903 photo finally appeared in print that September, accompanying an article written by Orville for another well-known periodical of the time, The Century Magazine. “Only by 1908 had the Wrights become savvy and confident enough to publicize their efforts,” Stephen B. Goddard explains in his 2003 book Race to the Sky: The Wright Brothers Versus the United States Government.

Today the original glass negative for that photo and several hundred others depicting the brothers’ experiments reside at the Library of Congress.

As for Daniels, the man who squeezed the bulb, he would achieve another notable first within hours. After the brothers, taking turns, had completed several more successful flights, the wind suddenly picked up.

Daniels attempted to hold onto the plane and keep it from being swept into the sea, but “got tangled up in the wires that held the thing together,” he recalled in a magazine interview in 1927. He found himself being dragged along with the plane as it bounced down the beach, “rolling over and over, and me getting more tangled up in it all the time.”

The Flyer was a total loss, but Daniels was able to walk away with some scratches and bruises. “I reckon I’m the proudest man in the world today because I was the first man ever wrecked in an airplane,” he told his interviewer.

While Daniels’ famous photo immortalized the event in black and white, he remembered it in vivid color.

“I don’t think I ever saw a prettier sight in my life,” he said of the plane that made history that day. “Its wings and uprights were braced with new and shiny copper piano wires. The sun was shining bright that morning, and the wires just blazed in the sunlight like gold. The machine looked like some big, graceful golden bird sailing off into the wind.”