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THE WRIGHT BROTHERS

THE WRIGHT
BROTHERS

By FRED C. KELLY

A Biography Authorized by
Orville Wright

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1943, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

All rights reserved, including
the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form.

[b-6-43]

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
The Brave Flyers of the United Nations
Fighting All over the World for Humanity
and Decency Against the Forces of Barbarism,
This Book Is Dedicated

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

The aim in this book has been to satisfy the curiosity of the average, non-technical reader regarding the work of the Wright Brothers, and to do so as simply as possible. No attempt has been made to go into minute technical details. Nor does the book cover the scientific researches and numerous inventions by Orville Wright since the death of his brother.

To give credit to everyone who has been gracious with help in the preparation of what I have written would require so long a list, with risk of names being unintentionally omitted, that I shall not attempt it.

But one name naturally and obviously comes first and foremost—that of Orville Wright himself. He has read my manuscript and given generously of his time in verifying the accuracy of various statements and in correcting inaccuracies which otherwise would have appeared.

Next in importance to that of Orville Wright has been the help received from his secretary, Miss Mabel Beck, whose memory and knowledge of Mr. Wright’s voluminous files enabled her quickly to produce documentary evidence to make certain of accuracy.

FRED C. KELLY

Peninsula, Ohio

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE WRIGHT BROTHERS

PROLOGUE

In a corner of the Pullman smoking compartment, by the window, the man who had been explaining the whole economic system mentioned inventors as an example of the fortunate relationship between desire for money and scientific progress.

“Take the Wright brothers,” he said. “Would they have worked all those years trying to fly just for their health?”

Another passenger ventured to ask: “Don’t people sometimes become curious about a problem and work to see what they can find out?”

The man by the window chuckled tolerantly as he replied: “Do you think those Wright brothers would have kept on pouring money into their experiments and risking their lives if they hadn’t hoped to get rich at it? No, sir! It was the chance to make a fortune that kept them going.” Most of the other passengers in the compartment nodded in agreement.

Not long afterward, one of those who had overheard that conversation was in Dayton, Ohio, and inquired of his friend Orville Wright: “Do you think the expectation of profit is the main incentive to inventors?”

Orville Wright didn’t think so. He doubted if Alexander Graham Bell expected to make much out of the telephone. And it seemed to him unlikely that Edison started out with the idea of making money. Certainly, he said, Steinmetz had little interest in financial reward. All Steinmetz asked of life was the opportunity to spend as much time as possible in the laboratory working at problems that interested him.

“And the Wright brothers?”

If they had been interested in invention with the idea of making money, said Orville Wright, looking amused, they “most assuredly would have tried something in which the chances for success were brighter.”

I
BOYHOOD

From earliest years both Wilbur and Orville Wright were motivated by what Thorstein Veblen called the “instinct of workmanship.” Their father, the Reverend Milton Wright, used to encourage them in this and never chided them for spending on their hobbies what little money they might have. But he did urge them to try to earn enough to meet the costs of whatever projects they were carrying on. “All the money anyone needs,” he used to say, “is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others.”

Both brothers were fascinated by mechanics almost from the time they were conscious of interest in anything. The childhood events most vivid in the recollections of Orville Wright have had to do with mechanical devices of one kind or another. One of the high spots was the day he attained the age of five, because he received for a birthday gift a gyroscopic top that would maintain its balance and spin while resting on the edge of a knife-blade.

Shortly after that fifth birthday, and partly because of his inborn enthusiasm over mechanics, Orville began an association with another boy that had an important influence on his life. His mother started him to kindergarten. The school was within a short walking distance of the Wright home and Orville set out after breakfast each morning with just enough time to reach the classroom if he didn’t loiter. His mother bade him return home promptly after he was dismissed and he always arrived punctually at the time expected. When asked how he was getting along, he cheerfully said all was going well, but did not go into details. At the end of a month his mother went to visit the kindergarten to learn just how Orvie was doing.

“I hope the child has been behaving himself,” said the mother to the teacher.

The teacher stared at her in astonishment. “Why,” said she, “you know, since the first few days I haven’t seen him. I supposed you had decided to keep him at home.”

It turned out that Orville had almost immediately lost interest in kindergarten and instead had regularly gone to a house two doors from his own, on Hawthorne Street, to join a playmate, Edwin Henry Sines. With an eye on the clock to adjust himself to the kindergarten hours, he had stayed there and played with young Sines until about a minute before he was due at home.

Orville’s father and mother were not too severe when this little irregularity was discovered, because the boys had not been engaged in any mischief. On the contrary, their play had been of a sort that might properly be called “constructive.” The thing that had occupied them most was an old sewing-machine belonging to Sines’ mother. They “oiled” it by dropping water from a feather into the oil-holes!

Both Orville and Wilbur followed their father’s advice and earned whatever money they spent. One source of income was from wiping dishes in the evening, for which their mother paid a flat rate of one cent. Sometimes she employed them to make minor household repairs. Orville seemed to find more outlets for money than did Wilbur, who was more saving, and from time to time he borrowed from Wilbur—but he kept his credit good by sticking to an arrangement they always made that the next money earned should be applied on the debt.

One of Orville’s early money-making ventures was the collecting of old bones in near-by alleys, vacant lots, or neighbors’ yards, and selling them to a fertilizer factory. He and another boy first did this as a means for raising funds with which to buy candy for use while fishing. They accumulated a weight of bones that it seemed to them must represent a small fortune—and were somewhat shocked when the buyer paid them only three cents.

At first, Orville’s associates in his projects were boys of his own age rather than Wilbur, who was more than four years older and moved in a different group; but a day came when the brothers began to share curiosity over a mechanical phenomenon. In June, 1878, when Orville was seven years old and Wilbur eleven, the Wright family left Dayton, because the work of the father, who had been made a Bishop of the United Brethren church, was shifted to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And it was in a house on Adams Street, in Cedar Rapids, not long after their arrival there, that an event occurred which was to have much influence on the lives of Wilbur and Orville—as well as to have its effect on the whole human race.

Bishop Wright had returned from a short trip on church business bringing with him a little present for his two younger sons.

“Look here, boys,” he said to Wilbur and Orville, holding out his hands with something hidden between them. Then he tossed the gift toward them. But instead of falling at once to the floor or into their hands, as they expected, it went to the ceiling where it fluttered briefly before it fell. It was a flying-machine, a helicopter, the invention of a Frenchman, Alphonse Pénaud. Made of cork, bamboo, and thin paper, the device weighed so little that twisted rubber bands provided all the power needed to send it aloft for a few seconds. As the brothers were to learn later, Pénaud, an invalid during most of his short life, had not only invented, as early as 1871, various kinds of toy flying-machines—both the helicopter type and others that flew horizontally—but was the originator of the use of rubber bands for motive power. Simple as was this helicopter—they called it the “bat”—Wilbur and Orville felt great admiration for its ingenuity. Though it soon went the way of all fragile toys, the impression it left on their minds never faded.

Not long afterward Wilbur tried to build an improvement on that toy helicopter. If so small a device could fly, why not make a bigger one that could fly longer and higher? Orville was still too young to contribute much to the actual building of larger models, but he was keenly interested as Wilbur made several, each larger than the one preceding. To the brothers’ astonishment, they discovered, that the bigger the machine, the less it would fly; and if it was much bigger than the original toy, it wouldn’t fly at all. They did not yet understand that a machine of only twice the linear dimensions of another would require eight times the power.

Orville, meanwhile, had distinguished himself in another way, by organizing an army. His grade at school was dismissed one Friday afternoon, though the rest of the school was in session, and it occurred to Orville that it might be amusing to march by, throw gravel on the windows, and taunt those who were still at their lessons. Supported by his friend, Bert Shaffer, he proposed to a dozen other boys in the class that they form themselves into an army, and act not as individuals but as an organization. For having thought of the idea, Orville, who had been doing some reading about Napoleon, would be the General, but there would be Colonels and Captains as well. In fact, they used up all the military titles they knew. Lacking guns, they would have to carry wooden clubs, and these they got by removing some loose pickets from the school fence. All went well until the school janitor began to chase them, evidently intending to capture them. One of the boys made him pause by throwing a rock in his direction as he was crawling through a hole in the fence. After escaping into a distant alley, all in the army assumed they would probably be in plenty of trouble when they returned to school Monday morning.

“We’ll be all right,” said Orville, feeling bound, as their commanding General, to try to uphold the army’s morale, “if we stick together. They can’t fire us all.”

He mounted a box lying in the alley and outlined what they should do. The teacher would doubtless single out only two or three of them that had been recognized by the janitor and ask them to stay after school. But if the teacher asked one of them to stand up, they must all stand up; or, if she asked one to stay after school, all must stay, and show their solidarity. “All for one, and one for all,” he quoted.

When they were back in school at the next session, the teacher said nothing to indicate that retribution was in the making; but when the class was dismissed at the end of the afternoon, she asked Orville to “remain.” True to their pact, all the rest of the army stayed in their seats—or, rather, all except one under-sized lad. A few minutes later, the teacher asked Orville to come to her desk. As he stepped forward, all the others started to do likewise. “The rest of you sit down,” commanded the teacher, and then added: “I don’t know why you’re here at all.” Her tone was such that all meekly sat down.

When Orville reached her desk, she said: “You were speaking of a song you could bring for the exercises next Friday”—and went on to talk, pleasantly enough, of Orville’s part in a forthcoming school entertainment.

She didn’t even seem to know about the daring behavior of the army in the school yard. Probably the janitor, embarrassed over his failure to capture the culprits, had not reported them.

While in Cedar Rapids, Orville showed enterprise in another direction. He had enough intellectual curiosity to study lessons that the teacher had not yet assigned. When a little more than eight years old he told his father that he was tired of the Second Reader they were still studying at school and wished he had a Third Reader.

One morning, not long after that, at the middle of the school year, the principal came to the room Orville was in and announced that any pupils who showed enough proficiency in reading might be promoted at once, without waiting until the end of the year, and begin the Third Reader. The more promising members of the class, selected by the teacher, then stood toeing a chalk mark, up front, as was commonly done, and took turns at reading. In his alarm lest he might not do himself full justice, Orville, someone told him later, held his book upside down. That did not prevent him from reading accurately, as he knew the book by heart, and he was promoted.

“I’m now in the Third Reader class,” he proudly announced when he reached home that noon.

“Well, that’s a strange thing,” said his father. “Just this morning I bought the Third Reader you asked for. But,” he added, “you won’t be able to use it today, because you’re going to miss school this afternoon. I have arranged for you and Wilbur to go to the photographer’s and have your pictures taken.”

Orville’s picture thus commemorated what had seemed to him an important event in his life.

After three years in Cedar Rapids, the Wright family, in June 1881, moved to Richmond, Indiana, partly that Mrs. Wright, who was not in robust health, might have the companionship of her sister who lived there. It was in Richmond that Orville took up the building and flying of kites. Though it interested him, Wilbur did not then take much part in this kite-flying sport, because he feared it might be considered too juvenile for a boy of his size. Orville came to be considered an expert at kite-making and sold kites to playmates as a convenient means of getting spending money. He made the framework of his kites as thin as possible, to reduce weight. Indeed, they were so thin that they would often bend in the wind and the kite formed an arc. But it did not then occur to Orville that this curvature of the kite’s surface had any relation to its good flying qualities.

Though he had turned his kite-making to profit, Orville’s best source of revenue in Richmond was a job of folding papers, a church publication. For additional spending money he entered the junk business. He would go after school or on Saturdays to pick up scraps of metal thrown out by a chain factory, and hauled this in his “express” wagon to a junk dealer’s yard.

One of his projects was the building of a small wooden lathe. It was too small to be quite satisfactory, and Wilbur offered to help him build a larger lathe, seven or eight feet long. This was the first “big” mechanical job he and Wilbur worked on together.

The lathe was considered a great success, especially by neighbor boys who thought it a privilege to work the foot-treadle that provided the motive power. But Wilbur felt that it should be improved. He had noticed that bicycles were being equipped with ball-bearings to give easy running quality and he said the lathe ought to have ball-bearings. He looked about the barn for material that could be adapted and took some metal rings from an old set of harness. When two of these were held tightly side by side they formed the outer track for the ball-bearings; but, instead of steel balls, marbles were used—the common kind, made of clay, that we used to call “commies.” Within this circle of marble bearings would rest the shaft of the lathe. The idea seemed so sound that the brothers’ friends were much impressed. Many were on hand in the upper floor of the barn awaiting eagerly the final tinkering before the ball-bearing “patent” could be demonstrated. As soon as the lathe was put into operation, there was a terrible noise and then it seemed as if the barn itself was beginning to sway and shake. It was evident that the marbles in the bearing had not been strong enough to withstand the stress; but why should the barn become so agitated? Orville went downstairs to find out if there could be any other cause.

When he reached the outside he saw his sister Katharine held against the side of the house by an invisible force. A small cyclone was taking place! All the boys upstairs had been too absorbed to notice such minor phenomena as weather.

Some of the enterprises Orville got into at Richmond were not of a mechanical nature; and Wilbur, if sharing in them at all, appeared only in the background, or as a consultant, for he was at an age when a boy gave thought to his dignity. Orville had noticed that many boys chewed small hunks of tar. It seemed to him that if the tar could be flavored with sugar to make it more palatable, and small pieces were wrapped in tissue paper, a market for the product might be found. He and his friend, Harry Morrow, began a series of experiments in the Wright back yard, and they seemed well on their way to having a saleable article. But as they kept testing their samples, both became ill—some kind of stomach disorder, accompanied by nausea—and abandoned their plans. Wilbur, though not a partner in all this, was much interested and for years afterwards used to refer to “that chawin’ gum corporation.”

If Orville was “into” more different things at this time than his brother, it was mainly because Wilbur’s great passion was for reading. And what he read, he absorbed. It wasn’t long until he himself began to show a gift for writing. Because of that, Wilbur played an important part in one of Orville’s early business ventures—though behind the scenes.

One of Orville’s friends was a boy living next door named Gansey Johnston, whose father made a hobby of taxidermy. They often played in the Johnston barn where the father had a collection of stuffed birds and animals. One day Orville’s imagination was much stirred. He saw possibilities for putting those birds and animals to good use—especially when he noted that there was even a huge black bear and a grizzly. It was obvious to him that he and the Johnston boy should form a partnership and he asked Gansey how he would feel about such an arrangement.

“Partnership to do what?” asked the boy.

Why, said Orville, to give a circus!

Though he had never thought of giving a circus, the Johnston lad caught the idea and soon was enthusiastic. They then decided to take in Orville’s friend, Harry Morrow, as a third partner. Their show would be known as The Great W. J. & M. Circus.

As the date for the big show approached, sixteen-year-old Wilbur Wright, who had been taking great interest in the preparations, asked Orville what he had done about advance notices in the newspapers. Orville had to admit that he had done nothing.

Wilbur appeared to be shocked that no one had taken steps fully to prepare the public mind for the coming event, and offered to write a suitable reading notice about the street parade. This, he said, should be placed in the Richmond Evening Item. He had absorbed the method of expression used in circus bills and his forecast of the parade was a masterpiece. There was nothing amateurish about the way he introduced such words as “mammoth,” “colossal,” and “stupendous,” nor about his use of impressively large figures—“thousands of strange birds from all parts of the world” that would positively be in the menagerie. It was announced that the proprietors of the big show would personally lead the parade on “iron horses”; and that Davy Crockett would positively appear with a grizzly bear. At the end of the notice, in professional manner, was the exact route of the parade, that the populace might not miss the great free exhibition of wonders. The notice also gave the prices of admission to the big show—three cents for children under three years; others, five cents. Wilbur gave the piece of publicity to Orville to take to the Item office.

There was a little box just inside a door to a stairway leading to the editorial rooms, and the boys knew it was intended for news items. But they walked up and down the street in front of the newspaper office for a long time before they had the courage to enter the stairway. What if someone should see them! Finally, when they thought no one was looking, one of them ran up to the box and in desperate haste deposited their piece of publicity. Then both ran up the street at a speed that could have attracted attention.

The editor of the Item evidently had a good news sense and recognized the mysterious “press release” as a local item worth printing. He had no way of knowing who “W. J. & M.” were, but felt sure the account of that forthcoming parade had plenty of reader interest. It came about, therefore, that Wilbur’s advance notice had a prominent position in the Item of September 10, 1883, under a heading that asked: “What Are the Boys Up To?”

Though some of Wilbur’s figures about the number of rare birds and wild animals may have been a bit overdrawn, to conform to circus bill standards, he had not exaggerated the amazing nature of the parade. Two of the proprietors, Wright and Johnston, actually appeared at the head of the parade on their “iron horses.” These were high-wheel bicycles, one of them having wooden spokes. The third associate proprietor of the big show, Harry Morrow, was unavoidably absent, because his parents had gone on a vacation trip to Michigan, and had insisted, much against his wishes, on taking him with them.

A principal “parade wagon” was the running gear of an old buggy, with no body but only a few planks to make a platform on which were some of the “thousands of rare birds,” and also the great, frightful grizzly bear held in leash by Davy Crockett. Though no horses were hitched to this “wagon,” plenty of boys had volunteered their services as “slaves” to pull it through the streets. At the last minute, “Corky” Johnston, nine-year-old brother of one of the proprietors, got into a fight with the circus bosses, and they felt compelled to deny him the privilege of participating in the parade. This created a problem, for he had been cast for the role of Davy Crockett, wearing his father’s hunting togs, including high boots. The circus chiefs got around that, the best they could, by assigning the Davy Crockett part to Corky’s younger brother, Griswold, not yet five years old. He was almost overwhelmed by the hunting suit; but in the rush of getting the parade started he was the best Davy Crockett available.

Wilbur’s advance notice was more successful than he had hoped for. It had aroused so much curiosity that when the parade reached that part of the announced line of march in the business section, the streets were lined with people—almost as many, in fact, as if the circus had been Barnum’s.

Messrs. W. & J., astounded by the unexpected attention the parade was attracting, began to feel much too conspicuous. They hastily decided that their route must be changed, and the parade turned up an alley!

So many customers came that not all who clamored for admission to the Johnston barn could be accommodated, and it was decided to repeat the show. But while those who got into the barn were viewing the “menagerie,” the boy who had been denied the privilege of appearing as Davy Crockett saw an opportunity to get his revenge. He got up on the barn roof and addressed the multitude, telling them they might as well disperse and seek their homes, because, he said, there would be no other performance.

The crowd took him at his word.

Orville Wright had previously organized another circus, in partnership with a neighbor boy named Miller, who had a Shetland pony. For this show the admission was only one cent. Though the gross receipts were not vast, the show was a great success, partly in consequence of the profound impression it had made on the Miller boy’s father. At the close of the performance, he announced that the show people would be guests of honor at a reception, to which the spectators also were cordially invited. Lemonade, ice cream, and cake were served in lavish quantities, and every boy felt that, taking the afternoon as a whole, he had had his money’s worth.

But of all the enterprises in which the Wright brothers showed their initiative in Richmond, the Great W. J. & M. Circus probably caused the most talk. People thought the boy who had organized that show would doubtless amount to something. Many ventured the opinion, too, that the youngster, whoever he was, who had prepared that notice for the newspaper about the parade, would surely be “heard from.”

II
BACKGROUND

Certain traits that were to show in Wilbur and Orville Wright—the pioneering urge, the gift for original thinking, and mechanical aptitude—were all in their ancestry.

Take, for example, their grandfather, John G. Koerner. Native of a German village, near Schleiz, he became so bitterly opposed to German militarism and autocracy that he determined to migrate to the United States. He sailed from Bremen to Baltimore early in 1818 and went to live in Virginia. Besides gaining recognition in the United States for his mechanical ability and for the superior quality of farm wagons and carriages he manufactured, he became known, too, as a person who did his own thinking. He did not accept all that he heard or read. Indeed, he seems to have been a “character.” It was his habit to read newspapers aloud to his family, and when, as invariably happened, he came to something that interested him because of approval, disapproval, or for any other reason, he would interpolate comment without changing his tone or rate of utterance. It was impossible for a listener to tell just how much that he seemed to be reading was actually in the paper and which ideas were his own. One by one, members of his family would study the paper afterward to see if various surprising statements were really there. No matter how commonplace a newspaper article may have been, it was never colorless as he read it.

His wife, the former Catherine Fry, American born, also came of pioneer ancestry, from the German language section of Switzerland. Their daughter, Susan Catherine Koerner, was born April 30, 1831, when they lived at Hillsboro, Loudoun County, Virginia, but the family moved to Union County, Indiana, shortly after that—at a time when there was still pioneering life in the Hoosier country. The Koerner farm became a rather impressive one for those times. There were finally a dozen or fourteen buildings, including the carriage shop, all conspicuous for their workmanlike construction and orderliness. John Koerner lived to the age of eighty-six.

Perhaps the most interesting pioneer of all in the Wright brothers’ ancestry was Catharine[1] (Benham) Van Cleve, the first white woman to set foot in Dayton. Her husband, John Van Cleve, whom she had married in New Jersey, was a descendant of a Van Cleve who had come from Holland to Long Island before 1650. When he proposed, a few years after their marriage, that they should settle in the almost unexplored virgin forest region of Ohio, she liked the adventurous idea. They migrated to Cincinnati—then called Losantiville—in 1790. Within two years after their arrival, John Van Cleve was killed by Indians. His widow married Samuel Thompson and, in April, 1796, they decided to try their luck at a settlement about to be established, fifty miles to the north. The place had just been named in honor of Jonathan Dayton, a Revolutionary soldier. Three groups of people arranged to make the trip at about the same time. So unsettled was the country, and so nearly non-existent were the wagon trails, that the party which included Catharine Van Cleve Thompson preferred to travel in a flat-bottomed boat on the Miami River. The others went by land. Though the boat trip took about ten days, that group was the first to arrive. Among those in the boat were some of the Van Cleve children; another of them was in one of the overland parties. A Van Cleve son, Benjamin, became the first postmaster at Dayton, the first school teacher, and also the first county clerk. His marriage at Dayton in August, 1800, to Mary Whitten, was the first recorded in Montgomery County.

Margaret Van Cleve, a sister of Benjamin, had stayed in Cincinnati, because she was about to be married—to George Reeder, later an innkeeper. They had a daughter, Catharine, who became the wife of Dan Wright (not named Daniel, but plain Dan, as was also his father), who had come to Centerville, Ohio, near Dayton, in 1811. It was of this union that Milton Wright, father of Wilbur and Orville, was born—in a log cabin in Rush County, Indiana, November 17, 1828.

Dan Wright’s ancestry could be traced back to one John Wright, known to have bought Kelvedon Hall, in Essex County, England, in 1538. A less remote ancestor, Samuel Wright, had migrated to America in 1636, and settled at Springfield, Mass.

At the time of his marriage, Dan Wright was employed in a distillery. But he evidently did not feel comfortable over his occupation and quit the distillery job to devote his whole attention to farming. Moreover, he “got religion” and would no longer even sell his corn to distillers. Perhaps it was because of the strong religious feeling of Dan Wright that his son, Milton, at the age of eighteen, had joined the United Brethren church.

Milton Wright attended a small college in near-by Hartsville, Indiana, and at the age of twenty-two he received from the United Brethren church his certificate entitling him to preach. But he did not at once actively enter the ministry. The pioneer urge was in him and he went to the Willamette Valley, in Oregon, where for two years he was a teacher in a small college conducted under the auspices of the church. It was three or four years after finishing his course at Hartsville that he met the young woman, a student there, who was to become his wife. Mutual friends had spoken to him of Susan Catherine Koerner, of how charming, how “smart” she was, and when he found an opportunity to be introduced to her, he was by no means disinclined to make her acquaintance. They were married on November 24, 1859, a week after his thirty-first birthday.

During the first few years after their marriage, the Milton Wrights lived at several different places in Indiana. Their first child, Reuchlin, was born in March, 1861, on a farm[2] near Fairmount; and Lorin, the second son, a year and a half later, in Fayette County, at the home of his grandparents. When Wilbur was born, April 16, 1867, the family was living on a small farm the father had bought near the village of Millville, eight miles east of New Castle. Wilbur was named for Wilbur Fiske, a churchman whom the father admired; but his name did not include the Fiske. None of the Wright children ever had a middle name.

For a year, the Rev. Milton Wright was minister of a church at Hartsville, and also taught in the college he had attended there. Then, in June, 1869, he became editor of the Religious Telescope, a United Brethren weekly, at Dayton, the home of those pioneer ancestors.

A year or more after their arrival for their first stay in Dayton, the Wright family bought, while it was still under construction, a modest seven-room house at 7 Hawthorne Street. This was on the West Side, across the Miami river, and about a mile from the main business section. Here Orville Wright—named for Orville Dewey, a Unitarian minister—was born on August 19, 1871; and his sister, Katharine, three years later to the day.

During the family’s absence in Cedar Rapids and Richmond, the Hawthorne Street house was rented, but the Wright family was once again to live there, for in June, 1884, the Rev. Milton Wright’s work brought him from Richmond back to Dayton. When, sixteen months later, the tenant’s lease expired and they were settled again at 7 Hawthorne Street, all the family felt that they were where they “belonged.”

The family’s return to Dayton was a few days before Wilbur would have been graduated from high school at Richmond. With the final year of the course so nearly completed, he would have received his diploma if he had been present with his class on commencement day. But Wilbur did not consider the mere diploma itself important enough to justify a trip back to Richmond, even though the distance was less than fifty miles. His decision was a subject for family talks and all agreed that Wilbur should do as he thought best. The father felt, as did the others, that receiving a diploma was ceremonial and less important than the actual education gained.

Wilbur decided to take a special course at the high school in Dayton the next year. He wished especially to continue the study of Greek, and to learn trigonometry.

Orville had been in the sixth grade at Richmond, but a week or two before the end of the year he got into a bit of mischief that caused his teacher, Miss Bond, to dismiss him. She said he could not return to school until either his father or mother came with him to guarantee that his deportment would improve. But his father was away from home at the time, and his mother was too busy packing for the move to Dayton to take time for consultation with that teacher. Orville simply stayed out of school for the rest of the year.

When he entered school in Dayton the next September, with no certificate to show that he had completed the sixth grade, it looked as if he might have to be in that grade for another year. But Orville was so violent and uncompromising in his protests that the school authorities said he might try the seventh grade until they could see how well he got along. At the end of the year he passed into the eighth grade with the highest mark in arithmetic in the city.

When Orville entered the eighth grade, Miss Jennings, who taught grammar, evidently thought she detected something mischievous about him and assigned him to a front seat in her class.

The next year, the same teacher had been promoted to the high school, as a teacher of algebra, and again she put Orville up in front where she could keep an eye on him. Orville’s front seats became a subject for family jests.

Later on in his high school course, Orville was demonstrating a problem in geometry on the blackboard, when his teacher, Miss Wilson, pointed out that though he had the correct answer, he evidently had not followed the textbook.

“I got it out of another book—Wentworth’s geometry,” Orville explained. And he added: “I get a lot of good stuff from Wentworth.”

Instead of complimenting him on having enough interest in the subject to consult another source, the teacher chided him for referring to what she called “a beautiful science” as “stuff.”

Orville had no compunction about telling at meal time of such episodes. He knew he wouldn’t be scolded. It was simply good conversational material and would provoke sympathetic laughter.

The family was interested, too, in the inventiveness of the boys. Lorin had once invented an improvement on a hay-baling machine. Wilbur had designed and built a practical device for folding paper. This was while he had the contract for folding the entire weekly issue of an eight-page church paper. He had found the hand work tedious and got up a machine that could be worked by a foot-treadle.

For a long time the mechanical ability that had aroused the most family admiration, though, was in the mother. Susan Koerner Wright was more than ordinarily resourceful in adapting household tools or utensils to unexpected uses. She was clever at designing clothes, too; and once she had built a sled for the two older boys. As her family used to say, she “could mend anything.”

The mother, however, was not long to be spared to her family. On July 4, 1889, or less than four years after the return to Hawthorne Street, she died. During the latter years of her life, Wilbur was much with his mother, and devoted himself almost constantly to her care, for he too at that time was an invalid, unable to engage in much outdoor activity.

Wilbur’s illness was in consequence of an accident. While playing a game of shinny, on skates, he was hit in the face with a shinny club. The blow knocked out all his upper front teeth. He began to suffer from a heart disorder from which he did not completely recover for several years.

After the death of the mother, and the departure of the two older brothers to establish homes of their own, the other members of the Wright family were all the more drawn together. Whatever one of them was doing interested all. And all—especially Wilbur—did much reading.

Two groups of books were in the home, one in Bishop Wright’s study upstairs, and another, used by the family, downstairs in the living room. Nearly all the books in the father’s library were “very serious,” but Wilbur often dipped into them, though the father made no effort to direct or control anyone’s reading. Downstairs, however, were the books that both Wilbur and Orville liked best. These included a set of Washington Irving’s works, both Grimm’s and Andersen’s fairy tales, Plutarch’s Lives, a set of the Spectator, a set of Addison’s essays, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, a set of Sir Walter Scott, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Green’s history of England, Guizot’s France, an incomplete set of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a set in which was Marey’s Animal Mechanism. Here also were a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Chambers’ Encyclopedia. The Britannica was an edition of the late 70’s and the Chambers’ Encyclopedia was an earlier edition. Though Wilbur was the great reader, Orville was not far behind him. He was fascinated by scientific articles in the encyclopedia almost from the time he learned to read.

Wilbur and Orville from time to time contributed to the family comfort in a substantial way. They built a spacious front porch, and all the lathe work for the posts they did themselves. Then they remodeled the interior of the house, changing the arrangement of the rooms. Other members of the family felt as much pride in such handiwork as if they had done it themselves.

More than their sturdy, intelligent, pioneer ancestry, it was probably the kind of home they lived in that had most to do with what the younger brothers were later to achieve. Orville expressed that with deep conviction many years afterward. A friend of his had remarked to him: “Even though what you accomplished was without the idea of making money, the fact remains that the Wright brothers will always be favorite examples of how American lads with no special advantages can get ahead.”

“But,” said Orville seriously, “that isn’t true. Because, you see, we did have special advantages.”

“What special advantages do you mean?”

“Simply that we were lucky enough to grow up in a home environment where there was always much encouragement to children to pursue intellectual interests; to investigate whatever aroused curiosity. In a different kind of environment our curiosity might have been nipped long before it could have borne fruit.”

III
PRINTING—AND BICYCLES

At the age of twelve, while living in Richmond, Indiana, Orville Wright became interested in wood engravings. His curiosity had been stirred by seeing some woodcuts by Timothy Cole and T. Johnson in the Century magazine. Wondering how the cuts were made he began to search the encyclopedia and one or two other books that told a little about the technique used. He then decided that he might be able to make some woodcuts himself if he had a suitable tool—and he went ahead to fashion such a tool from the spring of an old pocket-knife. (The next Christmas, Wilbur gave him a set of engraving tools.)

After trying his hand at his first few woodcuts, Orville naturally wished to make prints from them, and for this purpose he used a press his father had for copying letters. Today seldom seen, the old-fashioned letter-press consisted of two horizontal metal plates that could be forced close together by turning a little circular handle at the top of a threaded rod attached to the upper plate. One’s letter was moistened and placed next to a thin tissue sheet in a record book which went between the plates of the press. Under pressure, a copy of the letter was transferred to the tissue. Such a press was a fascinating device for a boy to play with. Indeed, Orville had used it for other purposes than that for which it was intended. It had also served him as a vise. And now it worked fairly well for making proofs from his woodcuts.

It was at about this time that the Wright family returned to Dayton from Richmond, and Orville renewed close relations with his old chum, Ed Sines. To his delight he found that young Sines was already interested in printing. He had a small press, obtained by trading a file, covering more than a year, of a boys’ magazine called Golden Days. This press was little more than a toy, capable of printing only one narrow line at a time, and the boys were never able to make much use of it. But, nevertheless, they immediately formed the printing firm of Sines & Wright.

At the beginning of the partnership of Sines & Wright, their printing establishment was in a corner of the Sines kitchen. Ed’s mother summed up the situation there when one day she noticed an envelope addressed to “Messrs. Sines & Wright,” from a type foundry. “It must be for you,” she said to the partners, “for you certainly are a pair of messers.”

Interested as they were in printing, Ed Sines and Orville had time for other hobbies. One of these was a telegraph line they rigged up between their homes. For years Wilbur Wright referred to it as “the first wireless telegraph,” because the boys used to shout the messages back and forth to verify whatever they clicked out on the keys.

It soon became evident that Orville had printers’ ink in his blood. This printing hobby was more than a passing fancy. His father was impressed by the boy’s persistence in trying to use inadequate equipment. The father knew that two of his older sons, Wilbur and Lorin, had recently had a chance to trade a boat they had made, now seldom used, for a small printing press. If they would make that trade, he suggested, and donate the press to Orville, then he would buy for the youngster twenty-five pounds of brevier type. This deal was made. The new press would print anything up to 3 by 4½ inches.

As the Sines kitchen was not quite the ideal location for their printing plant, Orville arranged for quarters in a “summer kitchen,” not often used, at the Wright home.

It now occurred to Messrs. Sines & Wright that it might be a good idea to print a newspaper for the benefit of their eighth grade classmates. They called it The Midget. Because of the limited capacity of their press, the paper was necessarily small, two narrow columns wide and four and one-half inches long. Most of the items in it were put directly into type, as they thought of them, and not from previously prepared copy. They found that the four pages they had planned entailed a surprising amount of work and to reduce this they put nothing on page three except “Sines & Wright,” twice, diagonally across the page, in script type. After they had printed about one hundred copies for distribution, Orville’s father saw one of these and immediately placed a ban on the whole issue. He insisted that the boys had not done themselves justice in slighting that third page. Readers of the paper, he said, might get the impression that the publishers were lazy or shiftless.

In a way, this suppression of the issue came almost as a relief, for the publishers had begun to feel misgivings about one somewhat daring item they had taken the liberty of printing. It was about their teacher, Miss Jennings, who was a strict disciplinarian. The item read: “Next week we propose to publish one of Miss Jennings’ famous lectures before the pupils of the Intermediate School on the Inherent Wickedness of School Children.”

Maybe, they reflected, it was just as well that The Midget was not to be distributed. Miss Jennings might take the item as good clean fun, but, on the other hand, she might raise a rumpus.

Before long the partners had an opportunity to buy a quantity of display type for $2, and then they began trying to establish themselves in the job-printing business. They set up their headquarters in the Wright barn, though on cold days they were likely to do their typesetting on a table in the Wright dining-room. Neighborhood storekeepers gave them a few orders for printing, and the firm began to take on airs. They employed Forrest Whitfield, a neighbor boy, as printer’s devil. He commanded a weekly wage of fifteen cents.

All was going well until one day they received an order from a man who wished to pay for his printing not in money but in popcorn. He assured them that this popcorn, on the cob, was worth more than the $2 the printing would have cost. But before deciding if they should accept the popcorn in payment, the partners prudently went to a grocer to get an estimate of its value. Sure enough, it was worth $2, and the grocer offered to buy it from them at that price.

Now Orville saw greater opportunities opening before them. With a liquid capital of $2, they could buy more type, do a greater variety of printing, and thus have more fun. But Ed Sines thought there was such a thing as over-extension of plant and equipment. Why not just divide their popcorn and eat it? Each was so uncompromising in his convictions that there was only one thing to do: one must buy out the other and they would dissolve the partnership. Inasmuch as Orville already owned the press they were using and most of the type, it seemed logical that he should be the buyer. By paying his share of the popcorn he was able to take over his partner’s interest without much cash outlay. Thenceforth, when they worked together, as from time to time they continued to do, Ed Sines was no longer co-proprietor but an employee.

At about this time, something set Orville to thinking of how interesting it would be to print circus bills. He wished some of his friends would organize a circus. Then he could do their printing. The idea seemed worth promoting. He went to the Truxell boys, and Fred LaRue, neighbors up the street, and convinced them that they had just the kind of abilities to organize and present a wonderful circus—one that would make a great hit with all the kids. The result of this talk was The Great Truxell Bros. & LaRue Show. Orville refused to accept any payment for printing the handbills and tickets of admission to the big show. The fun of doing it was all the reward he wanted.

Mrs. Wright had cleared out an upstairs room for Orville’s printing activities and that was his base for some time. He began to feel the need for a larger printing press and he determined to build one. The bed for the new press was an old gravestone he got from a marble dealer.

This press would print a sheet eleven by sixteen inches. Orville could now undertake larger printing projects. One order required more type than he had on hand. But that didn’t stop him. After he had used up all his type, with the job only half done, he recalled having heard of stereotype plates. He looked up in an encyclopedia a description of how such plates were cast from the impression of the original type in wet cardboard. And he contrived to make such a plate from the type already set. Then he redistributed that type for use in setting the rest of the job.

Ambitious to be a really good printer, Orville took employment during two summer vacations with a printing establishment in Dayton, and worked there sixty hours a week. But he felt that the most fun and satisfaction in connection with printing had been from building his own press. Along in the spring of 1888, when he was nearly seventeen years old, he started to build another press, bigger than any he had used before. He didn’t know exactly what he would do with it, but that question did not yet give him much concern. He would have the fun of building it. In the family woodshed was a pile of fire-wood cut in four-foot lengths. From these he made much of the framework, though he had to buy at a lumber yard a few longer pieces. From near-by junk yards he collected odds and ends of iron or steel that could be used. A difficult problem was to find a means of forcing the type against the printing surface, always with the same pressure, just enough and not too much. Orville searched the Wright barn and tool-shed for something that could be adapted, but without success until his eye happened to alight on the old family buggy. The buggy had a folding top, held firmly in place, when raised, by steel bars hinged in the middle. They were designed to force the top just so far and no farther. Exactly what he needed!

The job turned out to be much more difficult than Orville had expected, and Wilbur Wright, observing his kid brother at a tough job, offered to help him build the press. Some of the suggestions Wilbur made for moving parts of that press were peculiar in that they seemed to violate all mechanical rules and could not possibly be expected to work. Yet they did. Some time later, a well-dressed stranger entered the shop where Orville, merrily whistling, was feeding paper into his press, and asked if he might look at that “home-made printing outfit.” He had heard about it while visiting in Dayton. What at once astonished Orville and two or three boys in the shop was that the visitor, with complete disregard for his good clothes, lay right down flat on his back on the floor to study the press in operation. After he had observed it for several minutes, he got up, brushed himself off, and remarked: “It works all right, but I still don’t understand why it works.” Before leaving he laid his card on a table. He was the foreman of the pressroom of a newspaper in Denver.

Now that he had his new press, Orville wished he could put it to some purpose to make full use of the greatly increased printing capacity. The press was big enough and fast enough to print a newspaper. Why not start a neighborhood weekly? He had hardly more than thought of this before he decided to do so. It was probably the first time a paper was ever started just to use a press.

Orville now rented a room on West Third Street, near Broadway. The first issue of the paper—four three-column pages—appeared on March 1, 1889. In his salutatory, Orville said: “This week we issue the first number of the West Side News, a paper to be published in the interests of the people and business institutions of the West Side. Whatever tends to their advancement, moral, mental, and financial, will receive our closest attention.”

There were seventeen advertisements. A leading feature was a story about Abraham Lincoln and General Sherman, from the Youth’s Companion; and there was an article about Benjamin Franklin. The range of the publisher’s reading was indicated by a number of short paragraphs on foreign affairs, and about the approaching inauguration of President-elect Benjamin Harrison. Altogether it was a creditable job. No boyish “boners” or typographical errors were to be found.

All copies of the first issue were distributed free, as samples, but the paper was soon a fairly profitable enterprise. After the first few numbers, it was enlarged from three columns wide to four columns. Ed Sines devoted himself to rounding up advertisements and news items. From time to time Wilbur Wright helped to fill space by writing humorous essays, and after a few weeks his name was added to the paper’s masthead as “editor,” along with Orville’s as publisher.

Another contributor to the West Side News was a young Negro lad, a friend of Orville since grammar grades, Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose poetry afterward made him famous. Dunbar, in 1890, started a paper, The Tattler, for Negro readers, and Orville did the printing.

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.

THE FIRST CAMP AT KITTY HAWK. Top: The 1900 camp. Bottom: Kitty Hawk Bay as seen from the 1900 camp.

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.

THE 1902 GLIDER. The Wrights are testing the efficiency of the 1902 glider by flying it as a kite—September 19, 1902.

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.

The new machine was completed and ready for trial on the afternoon of July 27. Since it was designed to be flown in a wind of seventeen miles, and there was but thirteen miles of wind on that day, the brothers took the machine to the big Kill Devil Hill for its first trial. After five or six short tuning-up flights they made a glide of 315 feet in nineteen seconds. Although several flights on this first day of experiments in 1901 exceeded the best made the year before, yet it was soon evident that in several respects the machine was not as good as the first one. It was found that the wings, with a camber of one to twelve—the camber recommended by Lilienthal, and used by Chanute and others—was not so good as the camber of one to twenty-two, used by the Wrights in 1900. (Camber of one to twenty-two means that the length of the chord, the straight-line distance between the front and rear edges of the wings, is twenty-two times the distance from the chord to the deepest part of the wing curve.) This was demonstrated by the fact that the 1901 machine could not glide on a slope as nearly level as had the earlier machine. The Wrights found, too, that a machine with wings of one to twelve camber was not so easily controlled fore and aft as when the wings were of one to twenty-two camber. They decided therefore to reduce the camber of the wings to make them more like those of the earlier machine. When they resumed their gliding, after the camber had been reduced (one to eighteen), the control of the machine appeared to be as good as it was the year before, and they then made flights in winds of twenty-two to twenty-seven miles an hour, without accident. Though in most of these flights the lateral control was highly effective, in a few others—under conditions seemingly the same—the wing warping appeared to have no effect at all.

The Wrights now made the discovery that in free flight, when the wing on one side of the machine was presented to the wind at a greater angle than that on the other side, the wing with the greater angle, instead of rising as it was expected to do, sometimes descended. The explanation was that the greater angle of the wing at one side gave more resistance to forward motion and thus reduced the speed on that side. This decrease in speed more than counter-balanced the effect of the larger angle of the wing in producing lift. (The Wrights had not discovered this when flying the glider as a kite, because, when held by ropes, the wings always maintained equal air speeds, even when their resistances were unbalanced.)

It was evident to the brothers that their present method of controlling equilibrium was not yet complete. Something was needed to maintain equal speeds at the two wing tips. The idea occurred to them that the addition of a vertical fin attached to the machine at some distance in the rear of the wings might be the solution of the problem. But the test of such a fin had to be left until another season.

The behavior of the glider in these various flights forced the Wrights to give thought to another scientific problem, that regarding the center of air pressure on curved surfaces. Contrary to the teachings of scientific books on the subject, it was becoming more and more evident that the travel of the center of pressure on a cambered surface is not always in the same direction as the travel on a plane surface. When the angle of attack on a plane surface is decreased, the center of pressure moves toward the front edge; but on a cambered surface this is true only when larger angles are being decreased. When the angle of attack on a cambered surface is decreased from, say, thirty degrees to twenty-five degrees, the center of pressure moves forward, as it does on a plane surface; but when a certain angle (between twelve and fifteen degrees) is reached, then the movement of the center of pressure is reversed. From there on, the center of pressure moves toward the rear so long as any further decrease is made in the angle of attack. The Wrights proved this by a series of experiments with a single surface from their plane. Knowledge of the phenomenon of this reversal of center of pressure was of great importance to them in their later work of designing aeroplanes.

Scientific problems were not the only ones to perplex the Wrights. A sore trial were the mosquitoes and sandfleas, particularly numerous and aggressive in that summer of 1901. As Orville Wright recalled in later years, there were times when he thought, while fighting mosquitoes through the night, that if he could just survive until morning he would pack up and return home. Those mosquitoes might have caused a long postponement of the conquest of the air.

By the time they left Kitty Hawk on August 20, the brothers had satisfied themselves that a glider of large surfaces could be controlled almost as easily as a smaller one, provided the control is by manipulation of the surfaces themselves instead of by movements of the operator’s body. So far as they knew, judging from figures previously published, they had broken all records for distance in gliding. Chanute, who had witnessed part of the 1901 experiments, insisted that the results were better than had ever been attained before. All that was encouraging. But, on the other hand, if most of the supposedly scientific information available was worthless, then their task was even more formidable than they had expected. With no dependable previous knowledge to guide them, who were they to determine how man should fly? Wilbur seemed much discouraged. Possibly he had entertained hopes of actually flying, though he had always disclaimed having such an idea. He was ready to drop the experiments altogether. On the way home, Wilbur declared his belief: Not within a thousand years would man ever fly!

Chanute urged the brothers not to drop their experiments, arguing that if they did it would be a long time before anyone else would come as near to understanding the problem or how to work toward its solution. Without knowing it, Chanute made a great contribution to aviation history, for the Wrights heeded his repeated admonitions against ceasing their efforts. Without the proddings of Chanute they might not have gone on.

Chanute performed another great service for aeronautics when he, as president of the Western Society of Engineers, invited Wilbur Wright to address that body at a meeting in Chicago, September 18, 1901, on the subject: Some Aeronautical Experiments.

Wilbur shrank from the idea of making such a talk and would hardly have done so except to oblige his friend. He cautioned Chanute, though, not to make the speech a prominent feature of the program, because, he said, he made no pretense of being a public speaker. Chanute did nevertheless plan to use the announcement of the talk as a means to help make the meeting a big success. He wanted to know if it would be all right to make the occasion “Ladies’ Night.” Wilbur decided that he would already be as badly scared as a man could be and the presence of women would not make the situation much worse. But he insisted on one thing, that he must not be expected to appear in formal evening dress.

In this speech Wilbur boldly declared that the best sets of figures obtainable regarding air pressure against airplane surfaces appeared to contain many serious errors. Orville, at the shop in Dayton, was a little alarmed about that part of the speech. What if something about their own work had been wrong and the figures compiled by various scientists should finally be proved correct? Certainly it was no small responsibility for anyone so little known as Wilbur or he to denounce publicly the work of eminent scientists, dignified by preservation in books long regarded as authoritative. It would be both presumptuous and risky to brand supposedly established facts as untrue unless the person doing so could be unassailably sure of his ground.

In this cautious state of mind Orville rigged up a little wind-tunnel for the purpose of making a series of tests. This tunnel consisted simply of what appeared to be an old starch box, not more than eighteen inches long, that was lying in the shop. In it he placed a hastily constructed apparatus, a main part of which was simply a metal rod pivoted in the manner of a weather vane. Without attempting to give technical details of the method used, it may be said that a curved surface was balanced against a plane surface in an air current passing through the box. As Orville had provided the box with a glass top he could measure the angles to the wind at which the curved surface and the plane surface of equal area produced equal pressures.

The experiments with this crude apparatus lasted only one day. They were conclusive enough so far as they went, indicating errors in published figures relating to air pressure on curved surfaces. But as Orville was later to learn, the published errors were greatest in regard to wing surfaces set at small angles, such as would be used in flying, and he had tested thus far only larger angles. With the tests thus incomplete, Orville and Wilbur decided, on the latter’s return from Chicago, that it might be prudent to stay on the safe side and omit from the published record of Wilbur’s speech the more severe part of his criticism of available figures. They would wait until further wind-tunnel experiments could give more detailed knowledge. Consequently, when Wilbur’s speech appeared in the December, 1901, issue of the Journal of the Western Society of Engineers, it was a bit less startling than the one he had actually delivered—though, even after the deletions, there still remained strong hints that accepted tables of figures might be wrong. And the record of the speech was treated as of great importance. It has probably been reprinted and quoted as often as any other article ever written on the subject of flying.

The Wrights were not sure they would ever build another glider. But their curiosity, their passion for getting at truth, had now been too much aroused for them to quit studying the problem of air pressures. They decided to build another wind-tunnel, less crude than the one Orville had hastily used, and continue their experiments. The new tunnel consisted of an open-ended wooden box about sixteen inches square on the inside by six feet long. Into one end would come a current of air and the draft thus created would be “straightened,” as well as made uniform, by having to pass through a set of small pigeon-holes. It would have been a great convenience to use an electric fan for sending the air into the tunnel. But the Wrights had no electric current in their shop—still lighted by gas—and the fan was driven by a one-cylinder gas engine they had previously made. They attached the fan to a spindle that had held an emery wheel. A new measuring device, or balance, was built of wire intended for bicycle spokes, and pieces of hacksaw blades. These experiments were now done with much more refinement than at first, and the measurements were for both “lift” and “drift.” But as each curved surface measured was balanced against the pressure on a square plane, exposed at ninety degrees to the same air current, it was not necessary to know the precise speed of the air current.

During that autumn and early winter of 1901, the brothers tested in the wind-tunnel more than two hundred types of wing surfaces. They set these at different angles, starting with the angle at which the surface begins to lift, and then at 2½ degree intervals, up to twenty; and at five degree intervals up to forty-five degrees. They measured monoplane, biplane, and triplane models; also models in which one wing followed the other, as used by Langley in his experiments. They measured the lift produced by different “aspect ratios”—that is, the ratio of the span of the wing to its chord. They found that the greater the span in proportion to the chord the more easily the wing may be supported. They measured thick and thin surfaces. One surface had a thickness of nearly one-sixth of its chord.

Among other things, these experiments proved the fallacy of the sharp edge at the front of an airplane wing and the inefficiency of deeply cambered wings as then generally advocated by others. Sometimes they got a result so unexpected that they could hardly believe their own measurements—as, for example, when they discovered that, contrary to all previously published figures by students of the subject, a square plane gave a greater pressure when set at thirty degrees than at forty-five degrees.

These wind-tunnel experiments in the bicycle shop were carried on for only a little more than two months, and were ended before Christmas, 1901. The Wrights discontinued them with great reluctance; but, after all, they were still in the bicycle business, still obliged to give thought to their means for earning a living, and with no idea that this scientific research could ever be financially profitable. In those few weeks, however, they had accomplished something of almost incalculable importance. They had not only made the first wind-tunnel in which miniature wings were accurately tested, but were the first men in all the world to compile tables of figures from which one might design an airplane that could fly. Even today, in wind-tunnels used in various aeronautical laboratories, equipped with the most elaborate and delicate instruments modern science can provide, the refinements obtained over the Wrights’ figures for the same shapes of surfaces are surprisingly small. But it is doubtful if the difficulties and full value of the Wrights’ scientific researches within their bicycle shop are yet appreciated. The world knows they were the first to build a machine capable of sustained flight and the first actually to fly; but it is not fully aware of all the tedious, grueling scientific laboratory work they had to do before flight was possible. Important as was the system of control with which the Wrights’ name has been connected, it would not have given them success without their wind-tunnel work which enabled them to design a machine that would lift itself.

The Wrights had a double reason for making sure of their figures. With little money to spend on a hobby, it was much cheaper to rectify mistakes on paper than after the idea was put into material form. They knew that if they should decide to go on to further gliding attempts, they could not afford to spend much more money on apparatus built according to unreliable data.

After compiling their own tables of figures, the Wrights gave copies of them to their friend Chanute and others interested in the problem of aerodynamics. Chanute well knew that the Wrights now had knowledge of aeronautics far beyond that of anyone else in the world, and he felt that for them to go on with their experiments was almost a duty. He much regretted, in the interest of science, he said, that they had reached a stopping-place, for he was sure further experiments on their part promised “important results.”

Chanute might well have felt pride in the effectiveness of his insistence that the Wrights should go on experimenting, as well as in the results of his invitation to Wilbur to make that Chicago speech. Except for that speech and its daring statements that Orville thought needed more confirmation, there probably would have been no wind-tunnel tests; and without the kind of knowledge then obtained, neither the Wrights nor anyone else could have built a practical flying-machine. Those wind-tunnel experiments marked one of the great turning points in the long history of attempts at human flight.

It still remained for the Wrights to put their new knowledge to actual test in gliding, and they set out on August 25, 1902, for their third stay at Kitty Hawk. But not until September 8 were they able to begin the work of assembling their new glider, for the camp, battered by winter gales, needed much repairing; and they decided to build an addition to it for living quarters. They did not have their machine ready for its first trial until September 19.

This new glider was of not much greater lifting area than that of the previous year, though the wing span had been increased from twenty-two to thirty-two feet. But since the wind-tunnel experiments had demonstrated the importance of the “aspect ratio,” the total span was now about six times the chord instead of three. One minor change also may be noted. In the earlier gliders, the wing-warping mechanism had been worked by movement of the operator’s feet; but now in this 1902 glider it was done by sidewise movement of one’s hips resting on a “cradle.” The most noticeable change was the addition of a tail, consisting of fixed twin vertical vanes, with a total area of a trifle less than twelve square feet. Its purpose was to correct certain difficulties encountered in some of the flights with the 1901 machine. When the wing surfaces at the right and left sides were warped to present different angles toward the wind, the wing that had the greater angle, and therefore the more resistance, tended to lag behind, and then the slower speed offset what otherwise would have been the greater lifting power of that wing. The tail was expected to counter-balance that difference in resistance of the wing tips. If the wing on one side tended to swerve forward, on a vertical axis, then the tail, more exposed to the wind on that same side, should, it was thought, stop the machine from further turning.

Entirely apart from any advantages to be gained from the use of the tail, the first trials of the new machine were highly encouraging for another reason. It was soon evident that by disregarding all tables of air pressures used by their predecessors and building according to the figures obtained from their wind-tunnel experiments, the Wrights had made a big advance toward flight. Because of the knowledge they now had, not possessed by any previous experimenter, of how the wings should be shaped, this 1902 machine was of just about twice the “dynamic efficiency” of any other glider ever built; it could have been flown with probably less than half the power required for any other glider.

Altogether the Wrights made more than one thousand gliding flights in September and October, 1902. Several glides were of more than six hundred feet, and a number of them were against a thirty-six-mile-an-hour wind. No previous experimenter had ever dared to try gliding in so stiff a wind. That the Wrights were successful at such feats gave proof of the effectiveness of their devices for control. Some of their flights lasted more than a minute and at times it was possible to soar in one spot without any descent. So impressive were such exhibitions that Bill Tate’s brother Dan solemnly offered the opinion: “All she needs is a coat of feathers to make her light and she will stay in the air indefinitely.”

About one time in fifty, however, the machine behaved in a manner quite mysterious. It would turn up sidewise and come sliding to the ground in spite of all the warp the operator could give to the wing tips. At one trial the lateral control would work perfectly and then the next time, under conditions that seemed to be about the same, it was impossible to prevent one wing end from striking the sand with a kind of spinning movement that the brothers called “well-digging.”

This new problem, that had not occurred in their previous gliders, came from the fact that the machine had a tail. Those “well-digging” accidents were tail-spins—though that term did not come into use until several years afterward. But even after it was evident that the tail had something to do with the machine’s peculiar behavior, neither brother was prepared to explain why. Then one night Orville drank more than his customary amount of coffee. Instead of going to sleep as usual the moment he got into bed, he lay awake for several hours. Those extra cups of coffee may have been important for the future of practical flight for, as he tossed about, he figured out the explanation of the phenomenon caused by the tail. Here it is, as he eagerly gave it to Wilbur, and to their brother Lorin, who was visiting them, at breakfast the next morning:

When the machine became tilted laterally it began to slide sidewise while advancing, just as a sled slides downhill or a ball rolls down an inclined plane, the speed increasing in an accelerated ratio. If the tilt happened to be a little worse than usual, or if the operator were a little slow in getting the balance corrected, the machine slid sidewise so fast that this movement caused the vertical vanes to strike the wind on the side toward the low wing instead of on the side toward the high wing, as it was expected to do. In this state of affairs the vertical vanes did not counteract the turning of the machine about a vertical axis, caused by the difference of resistance of the warped wings on the right and left sides; on the contrary, the vanes assisted in the turning movement, and the result was worse than if there were no fixed vertical tail.

If his explanation was sound, as Orville felt sure it was, then, he said, it would be necessary to make the vertical tail movable, to permit the operator to bring pressure to bear on the side toward the higher wing. (This is the form of the Wright system of control generally used today—the independent control of aileron and rudder.)

Wilbur promptly saw that the explanation was probably correct and nodded approvingly. And he immediately made a suggestion. A particular relation existed, he said, in the desired pressures on the tail, no matter whether the trouble was due to difference of resistance of the wing tips or on account of sliding. Whatever the reason, it was desirable to get rid of the pressure on the side toward the low wing, to which a greater angle of incidence must be imparted in restoring lateral balance, and bring pressure on the side of the tail toward the high wing where there must be a reduced angle. So why not have the mechanism that controlled the wing warping and that which moved the tail operated in conjunction? Then the pilot, instead of having to control three things at once, would need to attend only to the front elevator and the wing-warping device. The brothers at once attached the wires controlling the tail to those that warped the wings—and they also changed the tail from two vertical fins to a single vertical rudder.

After the changes in the 1902 glider, the Wrights had their machine in about the form pictured and described in the drawings and specifications of their patent, applied for on the 23rd of the next March.

With their accurate data for making calculations, and a system of balance effective in winds as well as in calms, the brothers believed that they now could build a successful power-flyer.

VI
FIRST POWER FLIGHT

Immediately on their return to Dayton after the 1902 glider flights, the Wrights set to work to carry out plans, already begun at Kitty Hawk, for a power machine. The satisfactory performance of the glider had demonstrated the accuracy of the laboratory work on which its design was based, and they now felt sure they could calculate in advance the performance of any machine they built with a degree of accuracy not possible with the data available to their predecessors.

Early in their preparations, they took steps to obtain a suitable engine. They knew that a steam engine might do well enough for their purpose, but a gasoline engine would be simpler and better. Some time previously they had built an air-cooled, one-cylinder gas engine for operating the machinery of their small workshop; but they did not feel experienced enough to build the kind they now needed and preferred to buy one.

INSIDE THE 1902 CAMP. The kitchen corner of the 1902 camp at Kitty Hawk.

They wanted a motor to produce at least eight horsepower and to weigh, without accessories, not more than twenty pounds per horsepower. It seemed doubtful if such a motor as they required was then being manufactured; but perhaps one of the automobile companies could build one light enough by reducing the weight of the flywheel and using more aluminum than in the regular output. On December 3, 1902, they sent letters to a number of automobile companies, and to gasoline motor manufacturers, altogether to nearly a dozen, asking if they could furnish a motor that would develop eight brake horsepower and weigh not more than 200 pounds. Orville Wright was not sure in after years whether he and Wilbur revealed in their letters the use they planned for the motor they were seeking; but most of the companies replied that they were too busy with their regular business to undertake such a special order. There is reason to suspect the companies may have got wind of the purpose to which the motor would be put and were afraid to become implicated in the project. If a company provided a motor for a so-called flying-machine, and this fact should leak out, it could hurt their business prestige, because it might look as if they considered human flight a possibility.

FROM ORVILLE WRIGHT’S DIARY. Part of the entry for December 17, 1903—the day of the first power flight.

Thursday, Dec. 17^th

When we got up a wind of between 20 and 25 miles was blowing from the north. We got the machine out early and put out the signal for the men at the station. Before we were quite ready, John T. Daniels, W. S. Dough, A. D. Etheridge, W. C. Brinkley of Manteo, and Johnny Moore of Nags Head arrived. After running the engine and propellers a few minutes to get them in working order, I got on the machine at 10:35 for the first trial. The wind, according to our anemometers at this time, was blowing a little over 20 miles (corrected) 27 miles according to the Government anemometer at Kitty Hawk. On slipping the rope the machine started off increasing in speed to probably 7 or 8 miles. The machine lifted from the truck just as it was entering on the fourth rail. Mr. Daniels took a picture just as it left the tracks. I found the control of the front rudder quite difficult on account of its being balanced too near the center and thus had a tendency to turn itself when started so that the rudder was turned too far on one side and then too

One company replied, however, that they had motors, rated at eight horsepower, according to the French system of ratings, which weighed only 135 pounds, and if the Wrights thought this would develop enough power for their purpose, they could buy one. After an examination of the particulars of this motor, from which they learned that it had but a single cylinder, of four-inch bore and five-inch stroke, the Wrights decided that its power was probably much overrated.

Finally the brothers decided that they would have to build their motor themselves. They estimated that they could make one of four cylinders, of four-inch bore and four-inch stroke, weighing not more than two hundred pounds, with accessories included. Their mechanic, Charlie Taylor, gave them enthusiastic help. In its final form, the bare engine, without magneto, weighed 152 pounds; with accessories, 170 pounds. At 1,200 revolutions per minute, it developed sixteen horsepower—but only for the first fifteen seconds after starting; after a minute or two it did not give more than about twelve horsepower. Since, however, they had not counted on more than eight horsepower, for a machine of a total weight of 600 pounds, now they could add 150 pounds for strengthening wings and other parts. Not yet knowing how much power an engine of that size ought to have developed, the Wrights were much pleased with its performance. Long afterward they found out that the engine should have provided about twice as much power as it did. The trouble, as they later said, was their “lack of experience in building gasoline motors.”

The wings of this new power machine had a total span of a few inches more than forty feet, and the upper and lower wing surfaces were six feet apart. To reduce the danger of the engine ever falling on the pilot, it was placed on the lower wing a little to right of center. The pilot would ride lying flat, as on the glider, but to the left of center, to balance the weight. To guard against the machine rolling over in landing, the sled-like runners were extended farther out in front of the main surfaces than on the glider. These two runners were four feet, eight inches apart. The tail of the machine had twin movable vanes instead of a single vane as in the 1902 glider.

The Wrights left the designing of the propellers until the last, because they felt sure that part of the job would be easy enough. Their tables of air pressures, derived from wind-tunnel experiments, would enable them, they thought, to calculate exactly the thrust necessary to sustain the machine in flight. But to design a propeller that would give the needed amount of thrust, with the power at their command, was a problem they had not yet considered. No data on air propellers were available, but the Wrights had always understood that it was not difficult to obtain an efficiency of fifty per cent with marine propellers. All that should be necessary would be to learn the theory of the operation of propellers from books on marine engineering and then substitute air pressures for water pressures. What could be simpler or easier? Accordingly, the brothers got several such books from the Dayton Public Library. But when they began to read those books, they discovered to their surprise that much less was known about propellers than they had supposed.

All the formulae on propellers in the books were found to be based on experiment and observation rather than on theory. The marine engineers, when they saw that a propeller would not move a boat fast enough, had then tried one larger, or of a different pitch, until they got one that would serve their purpose. But they could not design a propeller on paper and foresee exactly what its performance on a certain type of motor-boat would be. Exact knowledge of the action of the screw propeller, though it had been in use for a century, was still lacking.

The Wrights knew that rough estimates, which might be near enough for a motor-boat, would not do for an airplane. On a boat a propeller having only a fraction of one per cent of the desired efficiency could move the boat a little; but on an airplane, unless the propeller had the full amount of thrust needed, it would be worthless, for it couldn’t lift the plane into the air at all! In short, the Wrights had to have a propeller that would do exactly what was expected of it. And they had neither the time nor money to carry on a long series of experiments with different kinds of propellers until they could hit on one suitable. They couldn’t afford to make mistakes except on paper. They must somehow learn enough about how propellers acted, and why, to enable them to make accurate calculations.

It was apparent to the Wrights that a propeller was simply an airfoil traveling in a spiral course. As they could calculate the effect of an airfoil traveling in a straight course, why should they not be able to calculate the effect in a spiral course? At first thought that did not seem too difficult, but they soon found that they had let themselves into a tough job. Since nothing about a propeller, or the medium in which it acts, would be standing still, it was not easy to find even a point from which to make a start. The more they studied it, the more complex the problem became. “The thrust depends upon the speed and the angle at which the blade strikes the air; the angle at which the blade strikes the air depends upon the speed at which the propeller is turning, the speed the machine is traveling forward, and the speed at which the air is slipping backward; the slip of the air backward depends upon the thrust exerted by the propeller, and the amount of air acted upon.” It was not exactly as simple as some of the problems in the school arithmetic—to determine how many sheep a man had or how many leaps a hound must make to overtake a hare.

In trying to work out a theory about the action of screw propellers, Wilbur and Orville got into many arguments. Right here it may be noted that this habit the brothers had of arguing technical points was one of the reasons why they were able to accomplish all they finally did in a relatively short time. Neither was a “yes” man to the other. But in their arguments about propellers a peculiar thing happened. “Often,” Orville later reported, “after an hour or so of heated argument, we would discover that we were as far from agreement as when we started, but that each had changed to the other’s original position.”

Many months passed before the intricacies of the problem began to untangle themselves. The Wrights finally got a better understanding of the action of screw propellers than anyone had ever had before. The time came when they felt sure of their ability to design propellers of exactly the right diameter, pitch, and area for their needs.

A calculation indicated that 305 revolutions of the propeller would be required to produce 100 pounds thrust. Later, actual measurement showed that only 302 instead of 305 propeller turns were required, or just under one per cent of the calculated amount. The propellers delivered in useful work 66 per cent of the power expended. That was about one-third more than either Hiram Maxim or Professor Langley in their attempts at flying had ever been able to attain.

For two reasons the Wrights decided to use two propellers. First, they could in that way obtain a reaction against a greater quantity of air, and at the same time use a larger pitch angle; and, by having the propellers run in opposite directions, the gyroscopic action of one would neutralize that of the other. The propellers were on tubular shafts about ten feet apart, both driven by chains running over sprockets, somewhat as on a bicycle.

L. M. Wainwright, president of the Diamond Chain Company, of Indianapolis, became interested in the Wrights’ transmission problem, and gave them valuable advice.

The Wrights found that the chains would have to be run through guides to prevent slapping and to overcome undue stresses on the machine. They adopted tubular guides and found that they could cross one of the chains in a figure eight and thus have the propellers running in opposite directions.

Not until September 23 was all in readiness for the Wrights to set out for Kitty Hawk. They were able to make good connections with a boat and arrived at camp two days later, on a Friday. Discussing en route what they hoped to accomplish, neither had the slightest doubt about the fulfillment of their dreams. Besides being full of confidence they also felt the exuberance of excellent physical condition. Orville was now thirty-two years old and Wilbur thirty-six. Five foot ten and a quarter inches in height, Wilbur was the taller of the two by a little more than an inch and a half. Orville weighed 145 pounds, about five more than Wilbur. Each of them had grayish-blue eyes and they might have been recognized as brothers, though in their own family Wilbur at that time was considered “more of a Wright” in his facial conformation. Orville looked a little more like his mother. Both were suitably built for bird men.

Plenty of annoyances, difficulties, and delays were still to be faced. When they reached their camp near Kill Devil Hill, the Wrights found that a storm had blown it from its foundation posts. They repaired the shed and also built a new one. With two sheds they had enough space for housing both the 1902 glider and the power machine, and also for a better workshop.

Just as the new building was nearing completion, the Kitty Hawk region had one of the worst storms in years. It came without warning, soon blowing forty miles an hour, and increased during the night until the next day the wind was more than seventy-five miles an hour. Orville risked climbing to the roof to nail down some of the more exposed parts. But by the time he got to the roof edge, the wind had blown his coat about him in a manner to pinion his arms and leave him helpless. Wilbur rushed to his assistance and held down his coat, but the wind was so strong that it was almost impossible to swing a hammer accurately enough to hit a nail.

Three weeks were needed for assembling the new machine. From time to time, also, they took out the 1902 glider, still in fairly good condition in the shed where they had left it, and got practice. After the first few trials each brother was able to make a new world’s record by gliding for more than a minute.

It was hoped to have the power machine ready for its first trial early in November. But at the first run of the motor on the completed machine, an unexpected strain from back-firing twisted one of the propeller shafts and tore loose the cross-arm to which the propeller was fastened. Both shafts were then sent back to the bicycle shop at Dayton to be made stronger. Dr. Spratt had arrived on October 23 to witness tests of the new machine, but the weather had become so wintry that he started home on November 5, taking with him as far as Norfolk the shafts for shipment to Dayton.

Octave Chanute came, on invitation, the next day, but he too found it difficult to be comfortable with the weather increasingly wintry and he stayed less than a week. Before leaving camp, Chanute had unintentionally given them something else to worry about. He had remarked that at least twenty per cent usually must be allowed in chain transmission for loss in power. As the Wrights had allowed only five per cent, they felt considerable alarm.

Since Chanute was a capable and famous engineer, it seemed prudent to find out whose estimates were more nearly correct. After Chanute had gone, the brothers suspended one of the drive chains over a sprocket and hung a bag of sand at each end of the chain. By measuring the amount of weight on one side needed to lift that on the other, they calculated the loss in transmission. As nearly as they could tell, this loss was even less than the five per cent they had estimated.

The shafts, made of larger and heavier tubing, arrived from Dayton on November 20. When they were tested again, a new difficulty appeared. The sprockets, which were screwed to the shafts and locked with nuts of opposite thread, kept coming loose. This was a small problem, and yet the brothers did not at once see any way to solve it. They went to bed discouraged. The next day, however, they tried, as they often did, something they had learned in the bicycle business. They had found a great variety of uses for the kind of cement intended for fastening tires to rims. Once they had used it successfully in fastening the hands of a stop-watch that several watchsmiths had said was beyond repair. Why not try tire cement on those sprockets? They heated the propeller shafts and sprockets, poured melted cement into the threads and screwed them together. There were no more loose sprockets.

Just as the machine was ready for test, bad weather set in. There was rain or snow for several days and a wind of twenty-five to thirty miles an hour from the north. But while being delayed by the weather the Wrights were not idle. They busied themselves contriving a mechanism to measure automatically the duration of a flight from the time the machine started to move forward to the time it stopped, the distance traveled through the air in that time, and the number of revolutions made by the motor and propeller. A stop-watch took the time; an anemometer measured the air traveled through; and a counter took the number of revolutions made by the motor. The watch, anemometer, and revolution counter were all automatically started and stopped simultaneously.

During this time, the Wrights occupied themselves also in making tests of the strength of the wings, as well as many satisfactory tests of the engine. During a test of the engine, on November 28, they discovered that one of the recently strengthened tubular shafts had developed a flaw and cracked!

With winter almost upon them, there was no time to trust to express service in getting the shafts to Dayton. Orville decided he would go there at once. Instead of tubular shafts, they would use solid tool steel, necessary, it seemed, to take up the shock of premature or missed explosions of the engine.

Not until Friday, December 11, did Orville get back to camp. (En route, he had read in a newspaper of the last unsuccessful attempt to fly the Langley machine over the Potomac at Washington.)

It didn’t take long to install the new propeller shafts and the next afternoon, Saturday, the machine was again ready for trial. But the wind was so light that a start could not have been made from the level ground with a run of only sixty feet permitted by the monorail track to be used. Nor was there enough time before dark to take the machine to one of the near-by hills, where, by placing the track on the steep incline, enough speed could be promptly attained for starting in calm air.

All day Sunday the Wrights just sat at the camp and read, hoping for suitable weather the next day. They were now particularly eager to avoid delay because of their boyish craving to be at home by Christmas. If there should be a spell of bad wintry weather they might have to stay at Kitty Hawk for another two or three weeks.