Courtesy, Smithsonian Institution.
Octave Chanute (1832-1910).
Samuel Pierpont Langley (1834-1906).
Eventually the Wrights were ready to begin “a systematic study of the subject in preparation for practical work,” and hoped to make contributions “to help on the future worker who will attain final success.” Searching for, but finding little material on attempts to fly in the Dayton Public Library, Wilbur wrote, in May 1899, to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington seeking information about publications to read on aeronautics. The list of books and articles suggested by the Smithsonian included works by Dr. Samuel P. Langley who later became its director and secretary. The brothers were encouraged by seeing that a man of Langley’s scientific standing believed in the possibility of flight at a time when few people did. Langley had been making aeronautical studies and experiments and succeeded in building power-driven models that flew. Later he built and attempted to fly a full-size, man-carrying powered machine; but in this he failed.
When a model flies, it does not necessarily follow that a full-size machine of the same design will also fly. As boys Wilbur and Orville had built model Pénaud helicopters that flew, but even the Wrights could not later have built a successful man-carrying machine by merely following Pénaud’s same general design. The difficulty is—as early experimenters with model machines unhappily discovered—that when the linear measurement of a model is doubled it needs about eight times the power to make it fly.
Among the sources suggested by the Smithsonian was Octave Chanute’s Progress in Flying Machines. Chanute, a successful construction engineer living in Chicago, had directed experiments with gliders of his own design. A longtime encouraging friend and adviser to the Wrights, Chanute made an exhaustive study of the history of aeronautics.
Problems of Flight
A pioneer experimenter once said that “it is easy to invent a flying machine; it is more difficult to build one—but to make one fly is everything.” As Lilienthal had seen, the Wrights also saw that, if ever they were to make progress in solving the problems of flight, they had not only to study them theoretically, but also to get up into the air in gliders and test their theories by actual practice. “If you are looking for perfect safety,” said Wilbur, “you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds; but if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial.” Preferring the air to a fence, the brothers recognized that when undertaking to fly gliders their first major problem would be how to fly safely so they could live long enough to learn to fly a powered machine.