Dec 27, 2016 5 min read

The story so far: Wilbur Wright has developed an idea for how to control a flying machine. He is ready to test his theory.

? Chapter Six

Young Walt Reinieger and his friends couldn’t help but be curious. They had just seen Wilbur Wright step out of his house on Hawthorn Street. He carried a biplane kite, a large one. The wings stretched five feet from tip to tip and were over a foot deep from their forward to trailing edge.

Walt cried out, “Where are you going, Mr. Wright?” The other boys joined in with, “Did you build that? Does it fly?”

Wilbur’s instinct was to guard his privacy, but Orville was off camping and he could use a hand. “I did build it,” he said. “But the question isn’t, will it fly? The question is, can it be controlled?”

The boys fell in behind him, arguing among themselves. “I don’t care if he did fix your bike,” Wilbur heard one boy say to Walt. “That thing’s too big to fly.”

They marched to an open field and made their way into it, rustling through the thick warm grass of summer. Wilbur took a firm grip of two sticks, each attached by two lines to the kite. “Take the kite,” he told the boys. “Carefully.” He stepped back as the boys lifted the kite. They held it until the wind caught it – and took it into the air.

“Told you,” Walt said to his friend.

“Now,” Wilbur said, “see how the lines connected to the forward right corners of the wings are attached to the stick in my right hand? Same sort of thing for the lines on the left side and the stick in my left hand. When I tip both sticks forward, like this, the kite should angle up.”

As Wilbur angled both sticks forward, the upper plane of the kite moved slightly behind the lower plane. Sure enough, the kite nosed up. Wilbur smiled.

“When I pull one stick back and let the other go forward, the kite should roll.” Wilbur angled the sticks as he spoke, and a slight twist ran through the frame of the kite. As Wilbur had predicted and hoped, this created different amounts of lift on the different sides of the kite. The kite rolled on its front-to-rear axis. When Wilbur reversed the angles of the sticks, the twist reversed itself, and the kite rolled the other way. Wilbur’s smile grew larger. He felt pleased with the kite, and not a little pleased with himself, either.

“And if I pull both sticks back,” he continued, “the kite should dive.” The upper plane moved in front of the lower plane, and the kite nosed down.

“Fantastic!” Walt said.

Wilbur thought so himself. Then the dive grew suddenly steeper. The next thing Wilbur knew, the innocent arrangement of wood and cloth was slipping out of the sky. Wilbur dropped the sticks, and he and the boys scrambled through the field to dodge the falling kite. It came hissing through the grass, and whacked against the ground. The crash wasn’t an ideal end to the experiment, but Wilbur was happy. He described the day to Orville as soon as he saw him.

“The next thing,” Wilbur told him, “is to build a glider. Large enough for a man. If I were to build a light tower and attach the glider to it with a rope, we could fly it like a kite. A person could ride it for hours at a time and master control of it.”

“Well,” Orville said, “it’s fine, really, to nearly bring a kite down on Walt Reinieger.” He paused. “But to be riding a kite that’s diving and out of control …”

Orville didn’t have to finish the sentence. Wilbur understood his point. Both brothers remembered the death of Otto Lilienthal. This was a serious business, full of risks, and Wilbur had better be sure of his next step before he took it.

But how to be sure? Wilbur didn’t know. Fall came, and his time was consumed with helping Orville build the bicycles they would sell the next year. Finally, in the spring, Wilbur was again able to give his attention to flying. He decided that he needed expert help. He needed someone to ask, “Am I doing something obviously wrong, or dangerous? Or am I on the right track?”

In May, Wilbur wrote a letter to a man named Octave Chanute. Chanute had written a book called Progress in Flying Machines, and had even tested his own gliders. Wilbur was only half joking when he wrote, “For some years, I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money if not my life.” He described the experiment he had in mind, and asked Chanute for his opinion.

Wilbur had his letter ready for the mail, when he hesitated. He wondered, what would Chanute, a well-known engineer, think? Chanute was born in Paris and lived in Chicago. He was educated and accomplished, old enough to be Wilbur’s father. And Wilbur, who was he? Wilbur was the co-owner of a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. He was perfectly anonymous.

Will drummed the envelope against his palm for a few beats, and finally mailed it. He walked home wondering whether Chanute would even bother to respond.

Octave Chanute: May – September 1900