Jan 3, 2017 5 min read

The story so far: Wilbur Wright is experimenting with kites and gliders. Needing advice, he has sent a letter to the well-known engineer Octave Chanute.

? Chapter Seven

“You look like you found something,” Orville said.

Wilbur, standing at the bike shop’s counter, had been going through the day’s mail. Now he had stopped. He was studying one envelope in particular.

“It’s from Octave Chanute,” said Wilbur. He was surprised to receive a response so quickly. In truth, he was a little surprised to receive one at all; Wilbur was a bicycle mechanic who built kites in his spare time. Octave Chanute knew as much about flight as anyone in the world.

As a young man, Chanute became a well-known engineer by designing railroads, bridges, and stockyards. At first he hid his interest in mechanical flight as if it were a bad habit he was trying to kick; “aeronautical engineering,” everyone knew, was just a batch of crackpot theories. Finally, though, Chanute’s curiosity grew greater than his fear of embarrassment. He directed all of his training as an engineer toward the question of how a flying machine would work. Chanute conducted experiments, published articles, and organized conferences. He became the leading expert on mechanical flight.

Wilbur opened the envelope. “I have your very interesting letter of the 13th,” Chanute began, “and am quite in sympathy with your proposal to experiment …” Chanute got right to business. He enclosed some articles, recommended others, and urged Wilbur on.

Chanute’s encouragement energized Wilbur. Soon, letter after letter was moving between Wilbur, in Dayton, and Chanute, in Chicago. Wilbur asked what kind of spruce would be best to use for ribs in the wing; Chanute recommended “sapwood, clear, straight-grained, and thoroughly seasoned.” Wilbur wondered what varnish was best for coating the fabric of the wings, to make them airtight; Chanute sent a recipe. Wilbur described his plan to build a tower and attach his glider to it; Chanute thought that a dangerous idea. “I have preferred preliminary learning on a sand hill,” he wrote, “and trying ambitious feats over water.”

In the workshop above the bike shop, Wilbur began constructing his glider. Occasionally Orville would come up from the showroom to check on his brother’s progress.

“It will be a biplane machine,” Wilbur told him. “Like the kite. But bigger, of course. According to the equation Lilienthal published, the wings need about two hundred square feet of surface area to fly in a fifteen-mile-per-hour wind. I could have made the wings smaller, but that’s the fastest wind in which I think I ought to fly.”

“It’s a reasonable speed,” Orville said.

Wilbur was concentrating too much to notice the kidding quality in Orville’s voice, or at least too much to respond to it. “Now,” Wilbur continued, “here’s the interesting part. Chanute trussed the wings of his biplane glider into a single beam. Something he learned while building bridges. I’ll do that, too. But I’ll joint and wire the wings so that I’ll be able to twist them, like I twisted the wings on the kite. When the ends of the wings hit the air at different angles, they’ll create different amounts of lift.”

Orville grew serious. “And with that you’ll be able to control the roll of the machine?”

Wilbur didn’t answer immediately. Control was the great unsolved problem in designing a flying machine. If he could overcome that problem, then…

“I won’t know until I test it,” Wilbur finally said. “Right now I don’t even know where I’m going to do that. The winds aren’t as strong or as regular around here as I need. I’m writing the Weather Bureau, looking for someplace with steady wind, good weather, open spaces. Someplace out of the way. Someplace with sand.”

“Sand?”

“I’ve become very interested in the idea of soft landings,” Wilbur said. “You should come along, Orv. I could use your help. The glider might work, it might not. In either case, you could think of it as a vacation.”

Orville weighed one of the machine’s metal joints in his hand. A bell rang; someone had entered the showroom downstairs. “A vacation,” Orville said. He set down the joint and walked down the stairs. “A vacation would be nice.”

On a Thursday evening in early September, Wilbur loaded his trunk and unassembled glider onto a southbound train. He took a seat by a window, and swallowed hard when the train lurched into motion. Orville would join him in a couple of weeks, if the place seemed satisfactory. For now, though, Wilbur was alone. He watched the landscape out the window turn less and less familiar. Dusk came on, and then darkness. Then only his reflection came back in the glass.

It had been years since Wilbur had been away from his family, or even out of Dayton. Now he was among strangers, heading toward a place no one he knew had ever even heard of. He lugged along a machine built with the help of Octave Chanute, a man he’d met only in letters. He’d never felt so nervous – or so excited.

Wilbur checked the map he had been careful to pack and dragged his finger along the train’s route. He was moving southeast, toward the coast. Letters from the Weather Bureau had pointed him to a sandy string of islands off the coast of North Carolina, to a little town called Kitty Hawk.

Kitty Hawk bound: September 1900