The Wright Brothers

by Fred C. Kelly

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.