Chapter III: Prologue (2)

By the time the _West Side News_ had been running a year, Orville had completed his course in high school. He thought the final year, devoted in the regular course largely to review, would hardly justify the time. Instead, having it in mind that he might decide to go to college and would need additional credits for college entrance requirements, he was a special student in Latin during that fourth year, attending high school an hour or two a day. The two elder Wright brothers had attended college in Iowa and Indiana, and later their sister Katharine took a degree at Oberlin, but both Wilbur and Orville gave up the idea of going to college, and neither ever received a diploma from high school. It may be added, however, that Orville in later years never agreed with those who suggested that “college might have ruined the Wright brothers.” More than once he said they doubtless could have done their scientific work more easily if they had had the advantage of college education.

Having decided, partly because of interest in the job at hand, not to go to college, Orville, in April, 1890, with Wilbur as partner, converted the _West Side News_ from a weekly to a four-page, five-column daily, called _The Evening Item_.

This venture, though it showed no loss, was never profitable. At that time the perfecting-press was coming into use and Dayton newspapers were issuing big, thick editions that proved to be increasingly keen competition for a small neighborhood sheet. After about four months the paper was suspended. But, as late as 1894, Orville and Wilbur published for a time a little two-column weekly called _Snapshots_, devoted to vigorous comments on current local events. After the first issue or two these were usually written by Wilbur.

Both Orville and Wilbur now became absorbed in one more new interest. Orville had owned in Richmond an old high wheel bicycle for which he had paid $3--borrowed from Wilbur. Now, a new European type of bicycle with wheels about the same size, and called a “safety,” had begun to be popular. In 1892, Orville bought one of these, a Columbia. It had pneumatic tires and cost $160. Six months later, Wilbur got a bicycle. His was an Eagle and he was able to get it at an auction for $80.

Orville promptly became interested in track-racing and began to enter his name in various local racing events. Wilbur, though he had been a great athlete--a wonderful fancy skater and the best performer in Dayton on a horizontal bar--never went in for racing, because not yet completely recovered from the effects of his skating accident.

Within a few weeks or months from the time they bought their bicycles, these Wright brothers decided to go into the bicycle business--to sell certain well-known makes. Then they soon found that they would have to add a repair shop. Their first sales room was at 1005 West Third Street. They rented it in December, 1892, to be ready for business when the bicycle season began in the early spring of 1893. For a while Orville divided his time between the bicycle shop and the job printing business across the street in which Ed Sines was still employed. (Sines continued to work there until 1898 when an accident to a lame knee forced him to seek another kind of work, and a few months later the shop was sold.)

The brothers soon had to move their bicycle business to larger quarters, at 1034 West Third Street. They were successful both in selling new machines and general repairing. Among the bicycles they sold at one time or another were the Coventry Cross, Halladay-Temple, Warwick, Reading, Smalley, Envoy and Fleetwing.

By 1895 increased business had caused them to move once more, to 22 South Williams Street, and soon they began to manufacture bicycles. The first “custom made” model was called the Van Cleve--after their pioneer ancestors. A later and lower-priced model was the St. Clair; and finally they made a still lower-priced machine called the Wright Special. It sold for as low as $18. Before they were through with the business they had put out under their own brand several hundred bicycles. Many of these were built in the last building the brothers occupied, a remodeled dwelling house at 1127 West Third Street--the building afterward preserved as a museum at Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan.

Much of their work when building new bicycles was done in winter, when selling was slack, in rooms upstairs over the shop, and from time to time the brothers were interrupted by the necessity of going down to attend to wants of customers. Sometimes they went down to meet a caller who wished only to borrow their air-pump to inflate a tire. They had no pressure-tank but kept a large hand-pump on the wall near the front door. To avoid needless trips downstairs, the Wrights contrived mechanical means by which they could tell if a caller’s wants required their attention. They took an old two-tone bell, intended to be fastened to a bicycle handlebar, and attached it to the wall in their upstairs work-rooms. By means of wires and other mechanism, the opening of the downstairs door yanked the thumb-lever on the bell in one direction, producing one tone; and shutting the door pulled the little lever in an opposite direction to cause the other tone. The hook on which the air-pump hung was also connected by a wire and a spring to a pointer upstairs. Thus it was possible to have secret knowledge upstairs if the caller might be a real customer or if he “only wanted air.” If he promptly helped himself to the pump, there probably was no need for anyone to go down. Then when the pointer showed that the pump was back on the hook and the bell signaled the closing of the door, on the caller’s departure, the brothers could feel sure they had not missed a sale of any kind by sticking to their work.

Throughout the time they were repairing, selling, and building bicycles, the Wrights continued to make various experiments, just for the fun of it. They made in 1893 what was doubtless the first pair of “balloon” tires ever installed on a vehicle. It was necessary to build a special “front fork” and widen the frame at the rear to make room for the over-sized pneumatics.

Orville even found time during this period for experiments having nothing to do with bicycles. Along about 1895, he made a new kind of calculating machine for multiplying as well as for adding. He worked also on a typewriter more simplified than any in existence.

Occasionally the brothers took in trade an old high wheel. They had two of these, about the same size, that they couldn’t sell for much, and the only way to get any benefit from them was to use them in a new way for sport. Why not, they asked themselves, convert them into a tandem? No one had ever heard of two high wheels operated as a unit, and though riding such an outfit might be dangerous, it also would be exciting. They put a swivel in the steel tube connecting the two wheels to prevent it from twisting and breaking. Then they began to practice, to learn the special technique the man on the rear seat had to know. It was a little different from any a bicyclist had needed before--a little like that of a man steering the rear end of a long fire truck. Though it looked fairly easy, only one person besides the Wrights ever succeeded in staying mounted. Indeed, riding even on the front seat was perilous enough. One afternoon Orville took the rear seat with a boy named Tom Thorne in front. As they tried to steer around a hole in the muddy street, the handlebar caught the leg of the lad in front, which prevented his turning far enough.

Of course there was a spill. Orville from the rear seat managed to land on his feet, but Tom Thorne, with one leg pinioned, was hurled headfirst to the street. When he came up for air none of his features was to be seen, so thoroughly was he plastered with mud. He looked so frightful that none of the boys who saw the mishap showed any amusement. They were afraid he had ruined his face. But Orville at once realized that the soft mud had prevented any injury and his young friend’s appearance struck him as the funniest thing he had ever seen. For some moments he was doubled up with mirth, unable to control himself, while the other rider, not exactly indignant but unable to enter into the hilarity, stood trying to gouge the mud out of his eyes with his thumbs. It happened that Tom Thorne had an intimate acquaintance with a family living near by and he went there, accompanied by Orville, to ask permission to wash up; but the girl who opened the door, though a lifelong friend, was unwilling to believe the strange-looking creature was anyone she knew. Tom asked her to call her mother. The mother had known him almost from the day of his birth, but she showed no sign of recognition now. She did finally identify him by his voice, however, and told him he might wash at the pump. He was able to remove some of the larger chunks of mud. Then he and Orville took the machine back to the shop. The episode was not one of the Wright triumphs. But neighbors who heard about it smiled and wondered:

What will those Wright boys be doing next?

As boys and girls of high school age were potential customers for bicycles, Wilbur Wright thought there should be an effective way to stir their interest in the makes of bicycles sold by the Wright Cycle Co. and he hit on a plan that showed him to have latent genius as an advertising man. He got a copy of a high school examination paper and had printed what appeared to be a set of examination questions--using the same kind of paper and the same typography. Then he arranged with one or two students to distribute these sheets at the high schools. At first glance a student would think he had got hold of an advance copy of an examination paper. But all the questions related to bicycles on sale by the Wrights!

A chum of the Wrights, Cordy Ruse, in 1896 had built the first horseless buggy ever run over the streets of Dayton. The Wrights and others used to sit and talk with him about some of his problems. They had many jokes about the difficulties of hitting upon a suitable ignition system, a workable differential, and other seeming insurmountables. Another problem, caused by the vibration of a horseless carriage, had impressed Wilbur most of all.

One day when the Wrights and several others were chatting with Cordy Ruse, Wilbur suddenly slapped his thigh and said:

“I’ve just thought of a wonderful invention! I’ll have it patented. It’s simple enough. All there is to it is a bed sheet to be fastened beneath an automobile to catch all the bolts, nuts, and other parts that’ll keep dropping off.”

Orville thought that, crude as horseless carriages were, they were probably the coming thing, and that eventually they might even hurt the bicycle trade. In 1897 he suggested to Wilbur that perhaps they might well give thought to the idea of going into the business of building automobiles.

No, insisted Wilbur, shaking his head, they would never be practical.

“To try to build one that would be any account,” declared Wilbur, “you’d be tackling the impossible. Why, it would be easier to build a flying-machine!”

IV

FIRST THOUGHTS OF FLIGHT

Ever since the Wright brothers had played with their Pénaud toy helicopter in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, their interest in whatever they chanced to read about flying-machines was probably greater than if the seed had not been planted in childhood.

Along in the early 1890’s, both Wilbur and Orville were likely to read any article they saw on a scientific subject, and to talk about it. Occasionally an article in a magazine that came to the Wright home dealt with attempts of man to fly. As time went on, such articles interested the brothers more and more. In 1895, both were impressed--perhaps more than they then realized--by a brief item they had come upon about the glider experiments, in Germany, by Otto Lilienthal. He had been gliding through the air, down the side of a hill, on a machine he had built. That, the brothers thought, must be the king of sports, to go soaring through the air on a gliding machine. They wished they knew more about Lilienthal and his work. All the reports they could find about him were meager enough; but what little they did learn increased their enthusiasm. Lilienthal, “the father of gliding flights,” was to have a tremendous influence on them.

Their interest in anything relating to Lilienthal was still strong in the summer of the next year, 1896, when Orville was taken ill--typhoid fever. Then, at a time when Orville was still delirious from the fever, Wilbur read that Lilienthal had been killed in a crash of his glider.

After Orville was well enough to hear about Lilienthal’s fatal accident, both he and Wilbur felt a greater eagerness than ever to learn more about what Lilienthal had accomplished, as well as of what had been tried by others, toward human flight. Books dealing with attempts of man to fly appeared to be scarce, but the brothers got whatever was available in the Dayton library, besides looking up articles on the subject in the encyclopedia. All they read, however, during the next two or three years did not satisfy their craving for a better understanding of the whole problem of flight.

Knowing that the Smithsonian Institution, at Washington, was interested in the subject of human flight, they decided to send a letter to the Smithsonian asking for suggestions as to reading material. The reply, received early in June, 1899, suggested: Octave Chanute’s _Progress in Flying Machines_; Professor Langley’s _Experiments in Aerodynamics_; and the _Aeronautical Annuals_ of 1895, 1896, and 1897, edited by James Means, which contained reprints of accounts of various experiments, clear back to the time of Leonardo da Vinci. Besides this list of suggested reading, the Smithsonian sent also some pamphlets, reprints of material extracted from their own annual reports, among which were Mouillard’s _Empire of the Air_, Langley’s _Story of Experiments in Mechanical Flight_, and a paper by Lilienthal on _The Problem of Flying and Practical Experiments in Soaring_.

This reading material arrived from Washington at a time when Katharine Wright had just returned from Oberlin College, accompanied by a young woman classmate. She had assumed that her brothers would help to entertain this guest, but, to her vexation, Wilbur and Orville had become too absorbed in their reading to have much time for girls.

It was now evident to the brothers that though the previous ten years had been a period of unusual activity, the results had not been encouraging. Maxim, after spending one hundred thousand dollars, had abandoned his work; the Ader machine, built at the expense of the French government, had been a failure; Lilienthal in Germany, and Pilcher, a marine engineer, in England, had been killed while trying to glide; Octave Chanute, too, after making some experiments in gliding, had quit.

Since Lilienthal had already aroused the brothers’ admiration, they were especially interested in what he had done. With hundreds of short flights, he had had more flying practice than anyone else, even though he had been in the air a total of only five hours in five years. Lilienthal became the Wrights’ hero. They decided that he, by his experiments, had made more advance in the flying art than had anyone else up to that time--an opinion, it may be added, that they never changed.

Their reading now gave the Wrights a good idea of how earlier experimenters had attempted to solve the problem of equilibrium. Some experimenters had placed the center of gravity far below the wings, on the theory that the weight would seek to remain at the lowest point. But it had been proved that the wings would then oscillate about the center of gravity in a manner destructive to stability. Others had arranged the wings in the shape of a broad V, to form a dihedral angle, with the center low and the wing tips elevated. This, too, tended to make the machine oscillate from side to side except in calm air. Pénaud, in his models propelled by rubber bands, had used wings that formed a dihedral angle, and a rear stabilizer set with its forward edge lower than the rear edge. This produced inherent stability in both lateral and longitudinal directions. Lilienthal, Chanute, and some of the others had used the Pénaud system in their gliders, but in addition to that system they counted on shifting the weight of their bodies to help maintain equilibrium.

All this reading, while adding to their store of knowledge, also gave the Wrights much misinformation. One wrong idea they got was that men already knew how to design wings and propellers of such efficiency that motors then available could easily sustain the machine in the air; another, that the greatest problem was to maintain equilibrium. They also were misled into thinking that fore and aft control of a flying machine would be much more difficult than lateral control.

That neither Lilienthal nor any other experimenter had ever tried any more adequate method to insure lateral balance struck Orville as surprising. Why, he asked himself, wouldn’t it be possible for the operator to vary the inclination of sections of the wings at the tips and thus obtain force for restoring balance from the difference in the lifts of the two opposite wing tips? That seems today an obvious enough idea, but no one had ever done anything about it before. Orville had hit on a fundamental principle. (Indeed, this principle later became the basic claim of the original Wright patent, and the claim was sustained, as covering the idea of the aileron control, in all countries where the Wright patents were adjudicated.)

Orville made a rough sketch of a wing, showing a stationary section at the center, consisting of approximately one-third of the wing, measured from tip to tip, with two adjustable sections, one at either side. These sections were carried on shafts interconnected by cogs mounted on the center section and extending toward the wing tips. The movement of a lever attached to one of the shafts would cause one wing section to rotate in one direction while the other wing would turn in the opposite direction. Thus a greater lift could be obtained on whichever side it was needed.

The Wrights soon saw, however, that for two reasons this particular design did not provide a good structure for a gliding machine. First, with two-thirds of the entire weight of the machine and operator carried by the two shafts, the structure would be weak; and, second, with the ends of the wings free to turn about the shafts, there would not be enough rigidity for a machine that would have to be toted about.

Then one night, some five or six weeks later, Wilbur came home from the bicycle shop, to tell Orville enthusiastically of an idea he had hit upon. A customer had dropped in to buy an inner tube for a tire. Wilbur had taken the tube from the pasteboard box it came in and was toying with the box while talking to the customer. As he twisted the box he observed that though the vertical sides were rigid endwise, the top and bottom sides could be twisted to have different angles at the opposite ends. Why, he thought, couldn’t the wings of a gliding machine be warped from one end to the other in this same way? Thus the wings could be put at a greater angle at one side than at the other, without structural weakness. That plan seemed so satisfactory that the Wrights did not look for or consider any other method.

A few weeks later, in August, 1899, the brothers built a biplane kite, and Wilbur, with a group of small boys as spectators, flew it on a common at the edge of town. This kite had wing surfaces five feet from tip to tip by thirteen inches wide. The warping of these surfaces could be accomplished by the use of four cords reaching from the kite to the ground. Two of the cords were attached to the forward corners of the right wing tips, one to the upper and one to the lower; the other ends of the cords, at the ground, were tied to opposite ends of a short stick to be held in the operator’s hand. The cords tied to the left wing were arranged in the same way. With a stick in each hand, the operator could move the wings as he desired. The upper wing could be moved farther forward or farther backward than the lower wing, according to the direction in which the two sticks were simultaneously inclined, by movement of the wrists. By inclining the two sticks in opposite directions it was possible to draw one upper wing tip farther forward than the lower at that end, while at the other end of the kite the lower wing tip would be the one farther forward. This moving of the wing tips in opposite directions caused a twisting or warping of the wings. Then the wing at one end would be presented to the wind at a different angle from that at the other end. If one end of the kite started to sink, sidewise balance could be restored by exposing the wing at that end at a greater angle, thus getting more lift.

Balance from front to rear was to be maintained by inclining the two sticks in the operator’s hands in the same direction--to move the upper wing either forward or backward over the lower wing, to change the center of lift.

But in addition to this moving of the wings forward and backward, the Wrights added an “elevator” at the rear. It was held by a pair of wooden rods attached at right angles to the uprights that connected the wings. When the upper wing was pulled forward, to turn the kite upward in front, the elevator met the air at its top side and was pressed downward, which helped to turn the wings upward--as the rear elevator does on planes today.

Though their interest did not lag, the Wrights did nothing more for some time about kite experiments, except to seek information in regard to wind velocity in different parts of the country. They wrote to the Weather Bureau at Washington, in December, 1899, and Willis Moore, chief of that Bureau, sent them a number of government bulletins that included statistics on wind velocities at various places. They looked these over, but at that time made no further investigation of any of the places mentioned.

In May, 1900, Wilbur Wright wrote a letter to Octave Chanute, living in Chicago, who had written _Progress in Flying Machines_. Though Chanute was better known in engineering circles by his work for certain western railroads, as well as for having built the Kansas City bridge and the Chicago stockyards, his book, a reprint of his articles published from 1891 to 1893, had made him probably the best authority on the history of aeronautics. Thinking Chanute would be interested, Wilbur told him in his letter of a plan he had for experimenting with a man-carrying kite by means of which, Wilbur thought, one would be able to get hours of practice in operating a machine in the air. He proposed the use of a high tower from the top of which a cable would lead to the man-carrying kite. He described to Chanute, in his letter, the system of control to be used in the kite--the warping of wings for lateral control, and the shifting of the upper surface backward and forward for longitudinal control--the same system used in the five-foot kite tested the previous August. Then he asked Chanute if he had any information as to locations where winds suitable for carrying on such experiments might be found. (This letter from Wilbur marked the beginning of an acquaintance and correspondence with Chanute that lasted for a number of years.) Chanute suggested San Diego, California, and St. James City (Pine Island), Florida, to be considered because of the steady sea breezes. But, on the other hand, he pointed out that, since those places were deficient in sand hills, perhaps even better locations could be found on the Atlantic coast of South Carolina or Georgia.

When the rush of the spring trade in bicycles began to subside, giving them more time for other interests, the Wrights again took up with enthusiasm the study of equilibrium. Each day they proposed and discussed new devices. Orville thought the shifting of the upper surface backward and forward over the lower one, for longitudinal equilibrium, though successful in their kite, would not be practical for a man-carrying glider, which would start and land on the ground. He suggested that the wing surfaces be fixed one above the other, and that an elevator be placed some distance in front of the wings, instead of at the rear. In this position there would be less danger of the elevator touching the ground in starting; and if from any cause the elevator were disabled it would be discovered before the machine got into the air. Wilbur then proposed that, since curved surfaces were more efficient than flat planes, the front rudder, or elevator, should be made flexible. Then it could be bent to present a concave surface on whichever side a pressure was desired, but would be flat when moving edgewise through the air.

The Wrights did not at first think an elevator in front would provide inherent stability--that is, it would not give the machine the desired tendency to restore its own balance just from the arrangement of its fixed parts. But Wilbur shortly afterward developed a theory that led him to believe the machine would have that quality.

Having read that the center of pressure moves toward the front edge of the wings whenever the wings are turned more nearly horizontal in flight, he thought inherent longitudinal stability could be obtained if the front elevator were set at a negative angle--that is, with its front edge lower than its rear edge. With such an arrangement of wings and elevator, every time the wings became more nearly horizontal in flight and met the air at a smaller angle on their under sides, the elevator would meet the air at a greater angle on its upper side. So, he reasoned, whenever, by becoming more nearly horizontal, the wings caused the center of pressure to move forward, tending to turn the machine upward in front, the front elevator would receive a greater downward pressure on its upper side and so counteract the disturbing pressure on the wings.

Actual tests later proved that the negative angle of the front elevator did not provide the inherent stability expected. The explanation was that the center of pressure on cambered wings traveled in the opposite direction from that which Wilbur’s reading had led him to expect. The Wrights later were to discover that Wilbur’s reasoning was correct; but because the travel of the center of pressure was rearward instead of forward the elevator had to be set at a positive instead of at a negative angle.

The Wrights’ elevator possessed three features not found in the gliders of any of the earlier experimenters. It was in front of the wings, where it was less liable to damage by striking the ground in take-off and landing; it was operable, instead of fixed as in other machines; and it flexed to present a convex surface to the air, instead of a flat surface. At this early stage of their work the Wrights considered this front elevator their most important invention, because, from their reading, they thought it was solving a problem more difficult than that of lateral control.

Though the Wrights’ reasons for placing the elevator in front of the wings were at first those just mentioned, they afterward found that this arrangement had much greater importance for two reasons not at first discovered. One of these was that it eliminated all danger of a nose dive when the plane got into what is known as a “stall”--when the speed became too slow. The other reason was that the elevator in front, set at a positive angle with the pressure on its under side, not only produced inherent stability, but also carried part of the load, and so relieved the wings to that extent. (An elevator in the rear, set at a negative angle to provide inherent stability, carries a pressure on its upper side, which adds just that much to the load the wings must carry.)

Around the first of August, 1900, the brothers decided to build a man-carrying glider on which to try out their inventions. To get practice in operating it they would first fly it as a kite. For such kite flying, flat open country would be needed; and for the gliding, sand hills free from trees or shrubs. Once again they examined the reports they had received from the Weather Bureau at Washington. Several of the places where winds might be suitable were in the Far West, but one in the East, much nearer to Dayton, was a place with an odd name, Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. They decided to write at once to Kitty Hawk for further information.

Wilbur Wright addressed a letter to the chief of the Kitty Hawk weather bureau station, asking for various details about the locality, explaining that he might wish to go there shortly to conduct experiments with a man-carrying kite. He inquired, too, if it would be possible for him and his brother to obtain board and lodging in the vicinity until they could get themselves established in a camp.

Joseph J. Dosher, in charge of the Kitty Hawk station, who received the letter, replied briefly, on August 16, giving the direction of the prevailing winds; and he described the nature of the land for many miles.

After writing his reply, Dosher handed Wilbur Wright’s letter to a neighbor, William J. Tate, with the request that he also make a reply. “Bill” Tate (later known as Captain Tate) was probably the best-educated man in that locality. He lived about a mile inland from the weather station, in the hamlet or settlement of Kitty Hawk, where he had formerly been the postmaster. For all practical purposes he still was the postmaster, though the office was in his wife’s name. Endowed with a gift for expressing himself readily in either speech or writing, Tate did a creditable job when he wrote to Wilbur Wright on August 18. Not only did he tell about the suitability of the Kitty Hawk region, because of the prevailing high winds, for the kind of experiments Wilbur had mentioned, but he went into details about the treeless sand hills and the general terrain. And he said arrangements could undoubtedly be made for the Wrights to obtain board for as long as desired.

The letters from Dosher and Tate--particularly the one from Tate--convinced the Wrights that Kitty Hawk was the place for their experiments. Almost immediately they decided they would go to Kitty Hawk as soon as they could build their glider.

The work at Dayton, getting parts and material ready for the glider, required only a few weeks. Only the cutting and sewing of the cloth covering for the wings, the bending of the ash ribs into shape, and making the metal connections, took much time. The cost of the whole machine in actual money outlay was trifling, probably not more than $15.

It was arranged that Orville should stay in Dayton, to look after the bicycle shop until Wilbur got settled at Kitty Hawk, and then join him there.

Wilbur set out on a September day, taking with him parts of the glider and all material needed to assemble it except some spruce lumber he expected to obtain nearer his destination.

The journey proved to be more of an undertaking than Wilbur expected.

V

GLIDING AT KITTY HAWK

One must look at a map of North Carolina to get an idea of the isolation of the long strip of sandy beach that separates the Atlantic Ocean from Albemarle, Pamlico, and Roanoke Sounds. At the time the Wrights went there, no bridges connected this beach with any part of the North Carolina mainland or even with near-by Roanoke Island, seat of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Lost Colony.” At one point on the beach was the Kitty Hawk life-saving station, and alongside of it a government weather bureau. About a mile back from the ocean was the hamlet of Kitty Hawk which, though it had a post office, was little more than a settlement, with only about a score of dwelling houses, most of them as widely scattered as in an ordinary farming community. Four miles south was the Kill Devil life-saving station.

It was not surprising that when Wilbur Wright, on September 9, 1900, reached Elizabeth City, North Carolina, the nearest railroad point to his destination, the first persons he chanced to ask about Kitty Hawk had never heard of the place. Then he learned that a boat made weekly trips to Roanoke Island; but it had gone the day before. Not liking delay, he went to the water front to inquire if another boat might be available. There he met one Israel Perry, formerly a resident of Kitty Hawk, who lived the year round on his little flat-bottomed schooner. As no other boatman showed any interest in making the trip, Wilbur booked passage with “Captain” Perry, despite the boat’s dirty, forbidding appearance. After loading parts of the glider and other goods that had been shipped from Dayton, he set out with Perry on the morning of September 10 for the forty-mile voyage to Kitty Hawk. Wilbur noticed that the small boat they used to go from the wharf out to where the schooner was anchored was leaking badly and he asked if it was safe.

“Oh,” Perry assured him, “it’s safer than the _big_ boat.” That didn’t inspire too much confidence in what was in store, and Wilbur soon learned that any misgivings he felt were amply justified. Toward the middle of the afternoon they met a strong head wind that forced them to seek a smooth water haven in North River where they anchored to await better weather. By that time Wilbur had worked up a good appetite; but he discovered that neither the food nor the kitchen met even minimum standards of cleanliness and he made excuses, as politely as he could, for not eating. All he had with him against hunger was a small jar of jelly his sister Katharine had slipped into his suitcase.

The weather was not favorable for continuing the voyage until the afternoon of the second day, and the boat reached a wharf, where there was a small store, on Kitty Hawk bay, at about nine o’clock that night. Not knowing where else to go, Wilbur stayed aboard until the next morning. A small boy named Baum agreed to guide him to the home of William J. Tate, about a quarter of a mile away. By the time Wilbur arrived there, on that morning of September 12, it was just forty-eight hours since he had tasted food other than his little supply of jelly.

After introducing himself, and in response to “Bill” Tate’s inquiries about how he enjoyed his trip, Wilbur spoke of his back being sore from lying on deck and of how his arm ached from holding on when the boat rolled. Then it came out that he had been unable to bring himself to eat the food provided on the Perry schooner.

“You mean to tell me,” asked “Bill” Tate, greatly concerned, “that you’ve eaten no victuals for two days?”

Here was a situation that called for quick action in a hospitable home. It was after the Tates’ breakfast hour, but Mrs. Tate soon had a fire in the kitchen stove and prepared a great platter of ham and eggs that the guest seemed to relish.

Then Wilbur inquired if it would be possible for him to obtain board and lodging there for the week or more until his brother “Orv” arrived.

Tate went into an adjoining room to ask his wife. As the door was ajar, Wilbur could hear what was said. Mrs. Tate was a bit alarmed. Here was a man able to devote time and money for weeks at a time to sport. Doubtless he must be a person of great wealth, accustomed to every luxury. Would he be satisfied with the best they could offer?

Wilbur stepped to the door, explaining that he could not help overhearing their conversation, and said it must be understood that if he were accepted as a paying guest he would not expect any extra frills, but would greatly appreciate the courtesy.

“This fellow’s a real gentleman,” thought Tate, and by way of settling the question, without waiting to hear any more from his wife, he said to Wilbur:

“You must be tired. Why don’t you come into our spare bedroom and take a nap?”

By the next day Wilbur was at work. The cloth covering for the glider--white French sateen of extra good quality--had already been shaped and sewed at Dayton, except at the ends, to permit fitting it over the framework. But now he had to make changes in the covering, because the glider was going to be smaller than originally planned. The longest timbers, for the wing spars, that he had been able to find in either Norfolk or Elizabeth City were only sixteen feet long instead of the eighteen-foot length he desired. Thus it was necessary to cut out strips from the middle of the lengths of cloth for both upper and lower wings. For resewing the cloth where necessary, Wilbur borrowed Mrs. Tate’s machine. But all the rest of the work of assembling the glider was done at a tent Wilbur set up, about half a mile from the Tate home, at a spot where there were a few trees and a view of the bay. He dragged the crates, containing various parts and tools, to the tent and hoped to have everything in readiness when Orville arrived. But the heat was intense, the job of carrying water to the camp used up much energy, and when Orville got there, on September 28, Wilbur told him regretfully that much work on the glider was still to be done.

Orville’s trip had been uneventful. Indeed, though he came on a better boat than Israel Perry’s, he had struck such a calm sea that his voyage from Elizabeth City took two days, the same as Wilbur’s. For the first five days after Orville’s arrival, both brothers stayed at the Tate home. Then they established themselves in camp. One end of their tent, twelve by twenty-two feet, was tied to a tree for anchorage. The tree was headquarters for a mocking bird that sometimes joined in the harmony when Orville twanged at a mandolin he had brought from home.

Not many visitors came to the camp from near-by Kitty Hawk. One reason for this was that the camp was considered dangerous after news got about that the Wrights used a gasoline stove. “Bill” Tate was favorably impressed, though, with an acetylene lamp, intended for a bicycle, that the Wrights used for lighting. He said he had a notion to install such a system of gas lighting in his house.

It was necessary to carry water about one thousand feet over the sand. Orville volunteered to do the cooking--and he continued to do so during all their experiments at Kitty Hawk. But he always felt that he had the better of the bargain, for the dish-washing job was Wilbur’s. As it was impossible to obtain fresh bread, Orville learned to make biscuits, and without use of milk. They were good biscuits, too--better, his father afterward insisted, than anyone else could make. To simplify operations, Orville always mixed at one time enough flour and other dry ingredients to last for several days, as biscuits had to be baked three times daily.

Working together, the brothers soon had the glider assembled. When completed it weighed about fifty-two pounds. Though the main spars were only sixteen feet long, the “bows” at the ends of each wing surface brought the total span to nearly seventeen and one-half feet. The total lifting area was 165 square feet instead of 200 as intended. A space eighteen inches wide at the center of the lower surface where the operator would lie, with feet over the rear spar, was left free of covering. The apparatus had no rear vanes or tail of any kind; but it had two important features never used by previous experimenters. One was the front rudder, or “elevator,” the rear edge of which was about thirty inches from the nearest edge of the wings; the other was the wing warping. By an ingenious arrangement of the trussing, the wings could be twisted into a helicoidal warp from one end to the other, thus exposing one wing to the air at a greater angle than the other. This was to be used for bringing the machine back to the level after it was tipped up sidewise by a gust of wind.

The Wrights’ first surprise at Kitty Hawk was that the winds there were not what they had counted on. United States Weather Bureau reports had led them to think they would have winds of about fifteen miles an hour almost every day. But now it dawned on them that fifteen miles an hour was simply the daily average for a month. Sometimes the wind was sixty miles an hour, and the next day it would be entirely calm. It now began to look as if they might frequently have to wait a few days for suitable conditions, which meant that their experiments would require more time than they had expected.

Almost as soon as they began their trials of the glider, the brothers got another surprise. According to the Lilienthal tables of air pressures, their machine of 165 square feet needed a wind of only from seventeen to twenty-one miles an hour to support it as a kite with a pilot aboard. But they found that much stronger winds were needed to lift it. Since suitable winds would not be plentiful, their plan of practicing by the hour aboard the glider while flying it as a kite would have to be postponed. Instead, they flew it as a kite, loaded with about fifty pounds of chain, but with no man aboard. They held it with two ropes, and operated the balancing system by cords from the ground. Though the results were promising, inspiring confidence in the system of maintaining equilibrium, the brothers knew that only by actual gliding experience could they confirm what the kite experiments had indicated as being true.

One thing that puzzled them was that the machine appeared to be greatly deficient in lifting power as compared with calculated lift of curved surfaces of its size. In wondering what might be the cause of this wide discrepancy between expected and actual lifts, the Wrights considered the possibility that it might be because the curvature of the wings was less than that used by Lilienthal. Or could it be that the cloth covering was too porous and permitted some of the lifting power of the wind to be lost? They wondered, too, if the Lilienthal tables they had followed, relating to air pressure on wing surfaces, could be in error.

They next determined to try gliding on the side of a hill. That meant toting their machine four miles south of their camp to a great sand dune about one hundred feet high, called Kill Devil Hill. On their first day at the hill, the wind was about twenty-five miles an hour. As they lacked previous experience at gliding they decided to wait for less of a blow for their first attempt. The next day the wind had subsided to fourteen miles an hour, and they made about a dozen glides. “Bill” Tate was there and assisted them.

In making these glides, the machine was usually only two or three feet from the soft, sandy ground, and though the brothers repeatedly made landings while moving at a speed of twenty miles an hour, neither operator nor machine was harmed. The slope of the hill toward the northeast was about 9½ degrees, or a drop of approximately one foot in six. After moving at a rate of about twenty-five to thirty miles an hour with reference to the wind, or ten to fifteen miles over the ground, the machine, while keeping its course parallel to the slope, increased its speed, thus indicating that it could glide on a slope less steep.

Their control of the machine was even better than they had dared to expect. They got quick response to the slightest movement of the front elevator, which promised to be satisfactory in maintaining fore and aft balance. At first, they fastened the warping mechanism, to make it inoperable, and had only the elevator to manipulate, for they feared that, inexperienced as they were, if they tried to use both, then they might be unsuccessful with either. But even without the use of the warping mechanism it was possible to make glides of from five to ten seconds before the sidewise tilt of the machine forced a landing. Before making the last three or four flights the Wrights loosened the warping wires to permit the sidewise control to be used.

When these experiments of 1900 ended, instead of the hours of practice in the air the Wrights had hoped to have, they had flown the machine as a kite with a man aboard barely ten minutes, and had had only two minutes of actual gliding.

Now that the experiments for that year were ended and they had no further use for the glider, the brothers weighted the machine with sand and left it on the hill. When “Bill” Tate saw that they were through with the glider he asked if he might have it, and they gladly gave it to him. Mrs. Tate used the sateen that covered the wings to make dresses for her two small daughters. She noted that it appeared to be unusually good fabric, more closely woven and better than she had seen in the stores. Some of her neighbors, when they saw the dresses she made of it, remarked that it seemed too bad to use such excellent material on a kite.

Though the amount of practice was less than they had expected, all the Wrights had learned in that season of 1900 seemed to confirm the correctness of certain opinions held at the beginning. Their method of warping or twisting the wings to maintain lateral balance was better than dependence on either the dihedral angle or shifting the weight of the operator; better than any method yet tried. And their front elevator had been highly satisfactory as a means for directing the machine up and down. Before leaving Kitty Hawk they decided that their next experiments would be with a glider large enough to be flown as a kite, with an operator aboard, in winds ordinarily to be counted on.

When the brothers set to work on their glider for the experiments of 1901, they decided to make it of the same general design as the first one, and with the same system of control. But they carried out their plan to give it considerably more area, to provide greater lifting power. Another change they made was to increase the curvature of the wings to conform to the shape on which Lilienthal had based his tables of air pressures. It had wings of about seven-foot chord (the straight line distance between the front and rear edges) with a total span of twenty-two feet, and weighed ninety-eight pounds. After a section twenty inches wide had been removed from the middle of the lower wing, and the rear corners of the wings rounded off, the total lifting area was 290 square feet, as compared with 165 in the previous glider. The front elevator, with its rear edge about two and one half feet away from the front edge of the wings, had a four-and-one-half foot chord and an area of eighteen square feet.

This was a much larger machine than anyone had ever tried to fly. The Wrights knew it could not be controlled simply by shifting the pilot’s weight, as others had done, but they had faith in their own operable front elevator and believed they could manage it. If their calculations were correct, it would be supported in a wind of seventeen miles an hour, with the wing surfaces at an “angle of incidence” of only three degrees. (“Angle of incidence,” now more often called “angle of attack,” has been defined as the angle at which the plane presents itself to the air in advancing against it.)

As it would be impractical to keep so large a machine with them in the tent, as they had done with the smaller glider, the brothers built near Kill Devil Hill a rough frame shed, twenty-five feet long, sixteen feet wide, and seven feet high at the eaves. Both ends of the building except the gable parts were made into doors, hinged above. When open, the doors provided an awning at each end of the building. For living quarters they still used a tent. By driving a pipe ten or twelve feet into the sand they got a water supply.

Though the great stretch of sandy waste seemed too desolate for anyone to bother about owning, yet it was all under the ownership of one person or another and the Wrights took the precaution to obtain permission to erect their buildings.

This year they were to have company in camp. Octave Chanute, with whom they had been in correspondence for about a year, stopped in Dayton in June, 1901, at their invitation, to get better acquainted. When he learned that the Wrights had carried on their experiments in 1900 without the presence of a doctor in camp, and were intending to do so again, he told them he thought that was too risky, considering the kind of work and the isolation of the experiment ground. He said he knew a young man in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, George A. Spratt, “an amateur” in aeronautics, who had had some medical training. Spratt had never seen any gliding experiments, and Chanute thought he would be eager for the opportunity. If the Wrights would board him at camp, Chanute said, he would be glad to pay Spratt’s traveling expenses to Kitty Hawk and would consider himself “compensated by the pleasure given to him.” Chanute also proposed that they have in camp with them E. C. Huffaker, of Chuckey City, Tennessee, who was building a glider that Chanute was financing, and the Wrights consented. Thus there were four regularly in camp that season, and for a time Chanute himself was with them as a guest.