Chapter I: The Conquest of the Air (2)

The earliest of these pioneers was Sir George Cayley, a country gentleman with estates in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, who devoted his life to scientific pursuits. He was born in 1773, and the balloons which excited the world during his boyhood directed his mind to the subject of aerial navigation. He invented many mechanical contrivances, and he laid great and just stress on the importance of motive power for successful flight. In 1809 he published, in _Nicholson's Journal_, a paper on Aerial Navigation, which has since become a classic, for although it stops short of a complete exposition, it is true so far as it goes, and contains no nonsense and no fantasy. He endeavoured, in the first year of Queen Victoria's reign, to establish an aeronautical society, but the ill repute of the balloon and the bad company it kept deprived him of influential support. He did his duty by his county, as a Whig magnate, and amused his leisure with science, till his death in 1857.

Cayley's work is difficult to assess. He had all the right ideas, though the means of putting them into practice did not lie ready to his hand. If he had been a poor man, he might have gone farther. He designed, so to say, both an airship and an aeroplane; there was no one to execute his designs, and the scheme fell through. He more than once anticipated later inventions, but he put nothing on the market. His mind was fertile in mechanical devices, so that if one proved troublesome, he could always turn his attention to another. He is content to enunciate a truth, and to call it probable. 'Probably', he says, in discussing engines of small weight and high power, 'a much cheaper engine of this sort might be produced by a gas-light apparatus and by firing the inflammable air generated with a due portion of common air under a piston.' This is an exact forecast of the engine used to-day in all flying machines. He has some good remarks on the shape that offers least resistance to the air in passing through it, that is, on the doctrine of the streamline. He knew that the shape of the hinder part of a solid body which travels through the air is of as much importance as the shape of the fore-part in diminishing resistance. He does not seem to have known that it is of more importance. He knew that the resistance of the air acting on concave wings, or planes, at a small angle of incidence was resolved chiefly into lift, and he suspected that the amount of the lift was greater than the mathematical theory of his day allowed. Above all, his treatise is stimulating, and suggests further inquiry and experiment along lines which have since proved to be the right lines.

Cayley's ideas were developed in practice by John Stringfellow, a manufacturer of lace machinery at Chard, in Somersetshire, and by his friend W. S. Henson, a young engineer. They constructed a light steam-engine, and designed an aeroplane, of which they entertained such high hopes that they took out a patent, and applied to Parliament for an Act to incorporate an Aerial Steam Transit Company. The reaction of public opinion on their proposals took the form of drag rather than lift, and they were thrown back on their own resources. In 1847 they made a model aeroplane, twenty feet in span, driven by two four-bladed airscrews, three feet in diameter, and they experimented with it on Bala Down, near Chard. It did not fly. Henson, completely discouraged, married and went to America; Stringfellow persisted, and in 1848 made a smaller model, ten feet in span, with airscrews sixteen inches in diameter. This machine, which had wings slightly cambered, with a rigid leading edge and a flexible trailing edge, made several successful flights, first in a long covered room at Chard, and later, before a number of witnesses, at Cremorne Gardens. After this success Stringfellow did no more for many years, until the foundation of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain in 1866 roused him again to activity. At the society's exhibition of 1868, held in the Crystal Palace, he produced a model triplane, which ran along suspended from a wire, and, when its engine was in action, lifted itself as it ran.

The foundation of the Aeronautical Society, with the Duke of Argyll as president and with a council of men of science, attracted fresh minds to the study of flight, and gave the subject a respectable standing. Mr. Wenham's paper, read to the society on the 27th of June 1866, proved that the effective sustaining area of a wing is limited to a narrow portion behind the leading edge; that, in order to increase this area, the planes of a flying machine might advantageously be placed one above another--an idea which was borrowed and put into practice by Mr. Stringfellow in his triplane--and that a heavy body, supported on planes, requires less power to drive it through the air at a high speed than to maintain it in flight at a low speed. For some years the society flourished; then its energies declined, and it fell into a state of suspended animation. At its second exhibition, in 1885, there were only sixteen exhibits as against seventy-eight at the exhibition of 1868. The prospects of practical success seemed remoter than ever. At last, thirty years after its foundation, it sprang into renewed activity, and, with Major B. F. S. Baden-Powell as secretary, did an immense work, from 1897 onwards, in directing and furthering the study of aviation. The _Aeronautical Journal_, which was published quarterly by the revived society, is a record of the years of progress and triumph.

The cause of this sudden revival is to be sought in the extraordinary fermentation which had been going on under the surface, both in Europe and America. The public was careless and sceptical; inventors who were seeking practical success were shy of premature publicity; papers read to learned societies were more concerned with theory than with practice; but there was hope in the air, and hundreds of minds were independently at work on the problem of flight. Some idea of the variety of suggestions and devices may be gathered from Mr. Octave Chanute's _Progress in Flying Machines_, a reprint of a series of articles by him, which appeared, from 1891 onwards, in _The Railroad and Engineering Journal_ of New York City. It was said in the ancient world that there is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has believed it; there is no imaginable way of flight that has not engaged the time and effort of some inventor. Yet among the multitude of attempts it is not difficult to trace the ancestry of the modern flying machine. Wing-flapping machines left no issue. Machines supported in the air by helicopters, that is, by horizontal revolving blades, can be made to rise from the ground, but cannot easily be made to travel. The way to success was by imitation of soaring birds; and it is worthy of note that some of the best minds were, from the first, fascinated by this method of flight, and were never tired of observing it. Cayley remarks that the swift, though it is a powerful flyer, is not able to elevate itself from level ground. Wenham records how an eagle, sitting in solitary state in the midst of the Egyptian plain, was fired at with a shotgun, and had to run full twenty yards, digging its talons into the soil, before it could raise itself into the air. M. Mouillard, of Cairo, spent more than thirty years in watching the flight of soaring birds, and devoted the whole of his book, _L'Empire de l'Air_ (1881), to the investigation of soaring flight. The pelican, the turkey-buzzard, the vulture, the condor, have all had their students and disciples. M. Mouillard, indeed, maintains that if there be a moderate wind, a bird can remain a whole day soaring in the air, with no expenditure of power whatever. To those who have watched seagulls this may perhaps seem credible; but air is invisible, and soaring birds are skilful to choose a place, in the wake of a ship or in the neighbourhood of a cliff, where there is an up-current of air, so that when they glide by their own weight, though they are losing height in relation to the air, they are losing none in relation to the surface of the earth.

The parents of the modern flying machine were the gliders, that is, the men who launched themselves into the air on wings or planes of their own devising. The scientific investigators, who experimented with machines embodying the same principle, did much to assist the gliders, but in justice they must take a second place. The men who staked their lives were the men who, after many losses, were rewarded with the conquest of the air. There are stories of a certain Captain Lebris, how in 1854, near Douarnenez in Brittany, he constructed an artificial albatross, and tying it by a slip rope to a cart which was driven against the wind, mounted in it to a height of three hundred feet. But the first glider of whom we have any full knowledge is Otto Lilienthal of Berlin. He devoted his whole life to the study of aviation at a time when in Germany people looked upon such a pursuit as little better than lunacy. The principal professor of mathematics at the Berlin Gewerbe Academie, on hearing that Lilienthal was experimenting with aeronautics, advised him to spend no money on such things--a piece of advice which, Lilienthal remarks, was unhappily quite superfluous. In 1889 he completed, with the help of his brother, a series of experiments on the carrying capacity of arched, or cambered, wings, and published the results in a book entitled _Bird Flight as the Basis of Aviation_. In his youth every crow that flew by presented him with a problem to solve in its slowly moving wings. Prolonged study led him to the conclusion that the slight fore-and-aft curvature of the wing was the secret of flying. But he knew too much to suppose that this conclusion solved the problem. A dozen other difficulties, including the difficulty of balance, remained to be mastered. When German societies for the advancement of aerial navigation began to be formed, he at first held aloof from them, for the balloon, which he regarded as the chief obstacle to the development of flight, monopolized their entire attention. His insistence on the cambered wing did not convince others, who went on experimenting with flat planes. German and Austrian aviators, it is true, were induced by his book to put aside flat surfaces and introduce arched wings. 'However,' he remarks, 'as this was done mainly on paper, in projects, and in aeronautical papers and discussions, I felt impelled myself to carry out my theory in practice.' So, in the summer of 1891, on a pair of bird-like wings, with eighty-six square feet of supporting surface, stabilized by a horizontal tail and a vertical fin aft, he began his gliding experiments. His whole apparatus, made of peeled willow sticks, covered with cotton shirting, weighed less than forty pounds. He was supported in it wholly on his forearms, which passed through padded tubes, while his hands grasped a cross-bar. He guided the machine and preserved its balance by shifting his weight, backwards or forwards or sideways. In this apparatus, altered and improved from time to time, Lilienthal, during the next five years, made more than two thousand successful glides. At first he used to jump off a spring-board; then he practised on some hills in the suburbs of Berlin; then, in the spring of 1894, he built a conical hill at Gross-Lichterfelde to serve him as a starting-ground. Later on, he moved to the Rhinow hills. His best glides were made against a light breeze at a gradient of about 1 in 10; and he could easily travel a hundred yards through the air. 'Regulating the centre of gravity', he says, 'becomes a second nature, like balancing on a bicycle; it is entirely a matter of practice and experience.' His most alarming experiences were from gusts of wind which would suddenly raise him many metres in the air and suspend him in a stationary position. But his skill was so great that he always succeeded in resuming his flight and alighting safely. He continued to improve and develop his machine. He made a double-surface glider, on the biplane principle, and flew on it. He experimented with engines, intended to flap the extremities of the wings--first a steam-engine of two horse-power, weighing forty-four pounds, then a simpler and lighter type, worked by compressed carbonic acid gas. But he explains that these can be safely introduced only if they do not impair the gliding efficiency of the machine, and he does not seem to have made much progress with them. His last improvement was a movable horizontal tail, or elevator, worked by a line attached to his head, to control the fore-and-aft balance of the machine. This fresh complexity was perhaps the cause of his death. On the 9th of August 1896 he started on a long glide from a hill about a hundred feet high; a sudden gust of wind caught him, and it is supposed that the involuntary movements of his head in the effort to regain his balance made matters worse; the machine plunged to the ground, and he was fatally injured.

Lilienthal was a good mathematician, a careful recorder of the results of his experiments, and a disinterested student of nature. Complete success was denied to him, but his work informed and stimulated others. The Wright brothers, when they first took up the problem of flight, had the advantage of acquaintance with Professor S. P. Langley's aeronautical researches, but their gliding experiments were shaped and inspired by what they had read of Lilienthal's achievements.

The other pioneer, who has earned a place beside Lilienthal, is Percy Pilcher. In 1893, at the age of twenty-seven, he became assistant lecturer in naval architecture and marine engineering at Glasgow University. He devoted all his spare time to aeronautics, and in 1895 built his first glider, which he named 'The Bat'. The machine was built, with the help of his sister, in the sitting-room of their lodging in Kersland street, Glasgow, and was tested on the banks of the Clyde, near Cardross. Some defects were revealed by the tests; when these were remedied, and the glider was towed by a rope, Pilcher rose to a height of twenty feet, and remained in the air for nearly one minute. Thereafter he built, in rapid succession, three new gliders, all of different design, which he called 'The Beetle', 'The Gull', and 'The Hawk'. The professor of naval architecture at Glasgow, Sir John Biles, says of him, 'He was one of the few men I have met who had no sense of fear.... I was deterred from helping him as much as I ought to have done by a fear of the risks that he ran. He at one time talked to Lord Kelvin about helping him: Lord Kelvin spoke to me about it, and said that on no account would he help him, nor should I, as he would certainly break his neck. This was unfortunately too true a prophecy.' The Hawk was the best of his gliders; at Eynsford in Kent, on the 19th of June 1897, he made a perfectly balanced glide of 250 yards across a deep valley, towed only by a thin fishing line, 'which one could break with one's hands'. After this, Pilcher began to make plans for fitting an engine to his glider. Since the first appearance of the Otto engine in 1876, and of the Daimler engine eight years later, the oil-engine had steadily developed in lightness and power, but no engine exactly suitable for his purpose was on the market, so he resolved to build one. An engine of four horse-power, weighing forty pounds, with a wooden airscrew five feet in diameter, was, by his calculations, amply sufficient to maintain his glider in horizontal flight. The light engine has now been so enormously improved, that it comes near to developing one horse-power for every pound of weight. The violent have taken the kingdom of the air by force: in Pilcher's day the problem was more delicate. He worked at his engine in his leisure time, and, leaving the firm of Maxim & Nordenfeldt, by whom he had been employed from 1896 onwards, made, in 1898, his own firm of Wilson & Pilcher. In the spring of 1899 he was much impressed by Mr. Laurence Hargrave's soaring kites, exhibited by the inventor at a meeting of the Aeronautical Society, and it seems that he embodied some of Mr. Hargrave's ideas in his latest built machine, a triplane. He intended to fly this machine at Stanford Hall, Market Harborough, where he was staying with Lord Braye, but on the day appointed, the 30th of September 1899, the weather proved too wet. Nevertheless Pilcher consented to give some demonstrations on The Hawk, towed by a light line; during the second of these, while he was soaring at a height of thirty feet, one of the guy-wires of the tail broke, and the machine turned over and crashed. Pilcher never recovered consciousness, and died two days later. His name will always be remembered in the history of flight. If he had survived his risks for a year or two more, it seems not unlikely that he would have been the first man to navigate the air on a power-driven machine. He left behind him his gallant example, and some advances in design, for he improved the balance of the machine by raising its centre of gravity, and he provided it with wheels, fitted on shock-absorbers, for taking off and alighting.

Lilienthal and Pilcher are pre-eminent among the early gliders, for their efforts were scientific, continuous, and progressive. But there were others; and it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the comparative value of experiments carried on, many of them in private, by inventors of all countries. Professor J. J. Montgomery, of California, carried out some successful glides, on machines of his own devising, as early as 1884; and Mr. Octave Chanute, the best historian of all these early efforts, having secured the services of Mr. A. M. Herring, a much younger man who had already learned to use a Lilienthal machine, made a series of experiments, with gliders of old and new types, on the shores of Lake Michigan, during the summer of 1896. About the same time some power-driven machines, attached to prepared tracks, were successfully flown. In 1893 Horatio Phillips flew a model, with many planes arranged one above another like a Venetian blind, on a circular track at Harrow; and in the same year Sir Hiram Maxim's large machine, with four thousand feet of supporting surface, was built at Baldwin's Park in Kent, and, when it was tested, developed so great a lift that it broke the guide rails placed to restrain it. Clement Ader, a French electrical engineer, worked at the problem of flight for many years, and, having obtained the support of the French Government, constructed a large bat-like machine, driven by a steam-engine of forty horse-power. In 1897 this machine was secretly tried, at the military camp of Satory, near Paris, and was reported on by a Government commission; all that was known thereafter was that the Government had refused to advance further funds, and that Ader had abandoned his attempts. When the Wrights had made their successful flights, a legend of earlier flights by Ader grew up in France; a heated controversy ensued, and the friends of M. Santos Dumont, who claimed that he was the first to fly over French soil, at length induced the French Government to publish the report on the trial of Ader's machine. The report proved that the machine had not left the ground.

It is not in mortals to command success; but those who study the record of the ingenious, persevering, and helpful work done for a quarter of a century by Mr. Laurence Hargrave, of Sydney, New South Wales, will agree with Mr. Chanute that this man deserved success. His earliest important paper was read to the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1884. In the course of the next ten years he made with his own hands eighteen different flying machines, of increasing size, all of which flew. His earlier machines were not much larger than toys, and were supplied with power by the pull of stretched india-rubber. On this scale he was successful with a machine driven by an airscrew and with a machine driven by the flapping of wings. As his machines grew in size he turned his attention to engines. He was successful with compressed air; he made many experiments with explosion motors; and he succeeded in producing a steam-engine which weighed seven pounds and developed almost two-thirds of one horse-power. In 1893 he invented the box-kite, which is a true biplane, with the vertical sides of the kite doing the work of a stabilizing fin. This kite had a marked influence on the design of some early flying machines. He also invented the soaring kite. His hope that man would fly was more than hope; he refused to argue the question with objectors, for 'I know', he said, 'that success is dead sure to come'. Moreover he put all his researches at the disposal of others. He refused to take out any patents. He did all he could to induce workers to follow his example and communicate their ideas freely, so that progress might be quickened. His own ideas, his own inventions, and his own carefully recorded experiments were a solid step in that staircase of knowledge from which at last man launched himself into the air, and flew.

In America the pioneer who did most to further the science of human flight was Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley, of the Smithsonian Institute, in Washington. He was well known as an astronomer before ever he took up with aeronautics. From 1866 to 1887 he was professor of astronomy at the Western University of Pennsylvania, at Pittsburg. During his later years there he built a laboratory for aerial investigations, and carried out his famous experiments. His whirling table, with an arm about thirty feet long, which could be moved at all speeds up to seventy miles an hour, was devised to measure the lifting power of air resistance on brass plates suspended to the arm. In 1891 he published his _Experiments in Aerodynamics_, which embodied the definite mathematical results obtained by years of careful research. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this work. The law which governs the reaction of the air on planes travelling at various speeds and various angles of incidence had been guessed at, or seen in glimpses, by earlier investigators; but here were ascertained numerical values offered to students and inventors. The main result is best stated in Professor Langley's own words: 'When the arm was put in motion I found that the faster it went the less weight the plates registered on the scales, until at great speed they almost floated in the air.... I found that only one-twentieth of the force before supposed to be required to support bodies under such conditions was needed, and what before had seemed impossible began to look possible.... Some mathematicians, reasoning from false data, had concluded that if it took a certain amount of power to keep a thing from falling, it would take much additional power to make it advance. My experiment showed just the reverse ... that the faster the speed the less the force required to sustain the planes, and that it would cost less to transport such planes through the air at a high rate of speed than at a low one. I found further that one horse-power could carry brass plates weighing two hundred pounds at the rate of more than forty miles an hour in horizontal flight.'

When these researches were known and understood, their effect upon the practical handling of the problem of flight was immediate and decisive. The aeroplane, or gliding machine, had many rivals; they were all killed by Professor Langley's researches, which showed that the cheapest and best way to raise a plane in the air is to drive it forward at a small upward inclination; and that its weight can be best countered not by applying power to raise it vertically, but by driving it fast. In the statistical tables that he prepared he called the upward pressure of the air _Lift_; the pressure which retards horizontal motion he called _Drift_. The words make a happy pair, but the word _Drift_ is badly needed to describe the leeway of an aeroplane in a cross-wind, so that in England another pair of words, _Lift_ and _Drag_, has been authoritatively substituted.

From this time onward Langley devoted himself to those other problems, especially the problems of balance, of mechanical power, and of safety in taking off and alighting, which had to be solved if he was to make a machine that should fly. He was much influenced, he says, by a mechanical toy, produced as early as 1871 by an ingenious Frenchman called Penaud, and named by its inventor the 'planophore'. This toy, which weighed only a little over half an ounce, was supported on wings, and was driven forward by an airscrew made of two feathers. The motive power was supplied by twisted strands of rubber which, as they untwisted, turned the airscrew. The wings were set at a dihedral angle, that is, they were bent upwards at the tips; and fore-and-aft stability was secured by a smaller pair of wings just in front of the airscrew. 'Simple as this toy looked,' says Professor Langley, 'it was the father of a future flying machine, and France ought to have the credit of it.' His own steam-driven flying machine was produced and successfully flown in 1896. It had two wings and a tail, with a supporting surface in all of seventy square feet; its total weight was seventy-two pounds; the engine, constructed by himself, weighed only seven pounds and developed one horse-power, which served to drive two airscrews, revolving in opposite directions. The best flight of this machine was more than three-quarters of a mile, and was made over the Potomac river. When, on its first flight, it had flown for a minute, 'I felt', says Professor Langley, 'that something had been accomplished at last, for never in any part of the world or in any period had any machine of man's construction sustained itself in the air before for even half of this brief time'. His flying machines were called by Langley 'aerodromes', and the word 'aeroplane' was used by him, as it is used in the _New English Dictionary_ of 1888, only in the sense of a single plane surface used for aerial experiments. But no usage, however authoritative, can withstand the tide of popular fashion; the machine is now an aeroplane, while aerodrome is the name given to the flying-ground from which it starts.

The success of his machine became widely known, and in 1898 the War Department of the United States, having ascertained that Langley was willing to devote all his spare time to the work, allotted fifty thousand dollars for the development, construction, and test of a large 'aerodrome', big enough to carry a man. The construction was long delayed by the difficulty of finding a suitable engine. This difficulty hampered all early attempts at flight. The internal-combustion engine was by this time pretty well understood, and, with the will to do it, might have been made light enough for the purpose. But it was almost an axiom with engineering firms that a very light engine could not wear well and was untrustworthy in other ways. One horse-power to the hundredweight was what they regarded as the standard of solid merit. Further, they were prejudiced against that extremely rapid movement of the parts which is necessary if the crank-shaft is to revolve more than a thousand times a minute. They were asked to depart from all their cherished canons and to risk failure and break-down in order that man should achieve what many of them regarded as an impossibility. It was with Langley as it was with Pilcher and the Wrights; he had to make his own engine. By 1901 he had completed with the aid of his assistants an engine of fifty-two horse-power, weighing, with all its appurtenances, less than five pounds to the horse-power. A year and a half more was spent in adapting and co-ordinating the frame and appliances, and in carrying out the shop tests. At last, on the 7th of October 1903, from a house-boat moored in the Potomac river, about forty miles below Washington, the first trial was made. The machine caught in the launching mechanism, and fell into the river, where it broke. It was repaired, and a second trial was made on the 8th of December 1903. Again the machine failed to clear the launching car, and plunged headlong into the river, where the frame was broken by zealous efforts to salve it in the dark. Nine days after this final failure the Wrights made their first successful power-driven flight, at Kitty Hawk, on the coast of North Carolina.

Langley was almost seventy years old when his last and most ambitious machine failed. He lived for two years more. If his contributions to the science of flight, which are his chief title to fame, were ruled out of the account, he would still be remembered as something more than a good astronomer--a man of many sciences, who cared little for his own advancement, and much for the advancement of knowledge.

From what has been said it is now possible to conceive how things stood when the brothers, Wilbur and Orville Wright, first attacked the problem of flying in the air. Men had flown, or rather had glided through the air, without engines to support and drive them. Machines had flown, without men to control and guide them. If the two achievements could be combined in one, the problem was solved; but the combination, besides bringing together both sets of difficulties and dangers, added new dangers and difficulties, greater than either. Plainly, there were two ways, and only two, of going about the business. Professor Langley held that in order to learn to fly, you must have a flying machine to begin with. Wilbur Wright, whose views on the point never varied from first to last, held that you must have a man to begin with. The brothers were impatient of 'the wasteful extravagance of mounting delicate and costly machinery on wings which no one knew how to manage'. When they began their experiments they had already reached the conclusion that the problem of constructing wings to carry the machine, and the problem of constructing a motor to drive it, presented no serious difficulty; but that the problem of equilibrium had been the real stumbling-block, and that this problem of equilibrium was the problem of flight itself. 'It seemed to us', says Wilbur Wright, 'that the main reason why the problem had remained so long unsolved was that no one had been able to obtain any adequate practice. We figured that Lilienthal in five years of time had spent only about five hours in actual gliding through the air. The wonder was not that he had done so little, but that he had accomplished so much. It would not be considered at all safe for a bicycle rider to attempt to ride through a crowded city street after only five hours' practice, spread out in bits of ten seconds each over a period of five years; yet Lilienthal with this brief practice was remarkably successful in meeting the fluctuations and eddies of wind gusts. We thought that if some method could be found by which it would be possible to practise by the hour instead of by the second there would be hope of advancing the solution of a very difficult problem.'

When this was written, in 1901, it was a forecast; it is now the history of a triumph. By prolonged scientific practice, undertaken with every possible regard to safety, on soaring and gliding machines, the Wrights became master pilots and conquerors of the air. Their success had in it no element of luck; it was earned, as an acrobat earns his skill. So confident did they become that to the end their machines were all machines of an unstable equilibrium, dependent for their safety on the skill and quickness of the pilot. Their triumph was a triumph of mind and character. Other men had more than their advantages, and failed, where these men succeeded. Great things have sometimes been done by a happy chance; it was not so with the Wrights. They planned great things, and measured themselves against them, and were equal to them.

Wilbur and Orville Wright were the sons of Milton Wright, of Dayton, Ohio. They came of New England stock. One of their ancestors emigrated from Essex in 1636, and settled at Springfield, Massachusetts; a later ancestor moved west, to Dayton. Wilbur was born in 1867, and Orville in 1871. They had two elder brothers and one younger sister; but Wilbur and Orville were so closely united in their lives and in their thoughts, that it is not easy to speak of them apart. Mr. Griffith Brewer, who knew them both, was often asked which of the two was the originator, and would reply, 'I think it was mostly Wilbur'; but would add, 'The thing could not have been done without Orville'. Wilbur, being four years the elder, no doubt took the lead; but all their ideas and experiments were shared, so that their very thought became a duet. Wilbur, who died in 1912, was a man of a steady mind and of a dominant character, hard-knit, quiet, intense. He has left some writings which reflect his nature; they have a certain grim humour, and they mean business; they push aside all irrelevance, and go straight to the point. After adventures in printing and journalism the two brothers set up at Dayton as cycle manufacturers. The death of Lilienthal, reported in the newspapers in 1896, first called their attention to flight, and they began to read all available books on the subject. They found that an immense amount of time and money had been spent on the problem of human flight--all to no effect. Makers of machines had abandoned their efforts. As for gliders, after the death of Lilienthal, Mr. Chanute had discontinued his experiments, and, a little later, Mr. Pilcher fell and was killed. When knowledge of these things came to the brothers, it appealed to them like a challenge. From 1899 onwards they turned all their thoughts to the problem. They watched the flight of birds to see if they could surprise the secret of balance. They studied gliding machines, and resolved to construct a machine of their own, more or less on the model of Mr. Chanute's most successful glider, which was a biplane, or 'double-decker'. When their machine was partly built, they wrote to the weather bureau at Washington, and learned that the strongest and most constant winds were to be found on the coast of North Carolina. They then wrote to the postmaster of Kitty Hawk, who testified that the sand-hills of that place were round and soft, well fitted for boys playing with flying machines. They took the parts of their machine to Kitty Hawk, assembled and completed it in a tent, and forthwith began their long years of continuous and progressive experiment. Their chief helper was Mr. Chanute. 'In the summer of 1901', they said, 'we became personally acquainted with Mr. Chanute. When he learned that we were interested in flying as a sport and not with any expectation of recovering the money we were expending on it, he gave us much encouragement. At our invitation he spent several weeks with us at our camp at Kill Devil Hill, four miles south of Kitty Hawk, during our experiments of that and the two succeeding years.'

The first two summers, 1900 and 1901, brought them some familiarity in the handling of their first two gliders, which they navigated lying face downward on the lower plane. In all their gliding experiments they studied safety first. They knew that the business they had embarked on was of necessity a long and dangerous one; that they were bound to encounter many dangers, and that each of them had only one life. They took no avoidable risks. Gliding seemed to them, at first, to have been discredited by the deaths of Lilienthal and Pilcher, so they planned to try their machine by tethering it with a rope and letting it float a few feet from the ground, while they practised manipulation. The wind proved to be not strong enough to sustain the weighted machine, and they were compelled to take to gliding. All their early glides were made as near the ground as possible. The machine had no vertical rudder, but they fitted it, in front, with what they called a horizontal rudder, that is, an elevator. By the use of this they could bring it to the ground at once when the wind was tricky and their balance was threatened. The lateral balance they attempted to control by warping the wings, but with no satisfactory results. They made glides longer than any on record, but while the problem of stability was still unsolved, there could be no real progress. At the end of 1901, Wilbur Wright made the prediction that men would some time fly, but that it would not be in their lifetime.

They returned to Dayton, and spent the winter in experiment and research. They had taken up aeronautics partly as a sport; they were now drawn deeper and deeper into the scientific study of it. They made a wind-tunnel, sixteen inches square and about six feet long, and tested in it the lift and drag of model wings, made in various sizes and with various aspect ratios. The tables which they compiled from these experiments were continually used by them thereafter, and superseded the tables of Lilienthal and Langley, which took no account of the aspect ratio. When they returned to Kitty Hawk, in the autumn of 1902, they took with them a greatly improved glider. The aspect ratio of the planes was six to one, instead of about three to one, as in their second glider. Further, while preserving the horizontal vane, or elevator, at the front of the machine, they added a vertical vane, or rudder, at the rear. It was their failure to control the lateral balance in the experiments of 1901 that suggested this device to them. From the first they had discarded the method, practised by Lilienthal and Pilcher, of adjusting the lateral balance by shifting the weight of the operator's body. This method seemed to them 'incapable of expansion to meet large conditions, because the weight to be moved and the distance of possible motion were limited, while the disturbing forces steadily increased, both with wing area and with wing velocity'. Accordingly they invented a method of warping the wings, to present them to the wind at different angles on the right and left sides. Thus the force of the wind was used to restore the balance which the wind itself had disturbed. But in their early gliders this warping process acted in an unexpected way. The wing which, in order to raise that side of the machine, was presented to the wind at the greater angle of incidence often proved to be the wing which lagged and sank. The decrease in speed, due to the extra drag, more than counterbalanced the effect of the larger angle. When they attempted to remedy this by introducing a fixed vertical vane in the rear, 'it increased the trouble and made the machine 'absolutely dangerous'. Any side-slip became irrecoverable by causing the vertical fixed vane to strike the wind on the side toward the low wing, instead of on the side toward the high wing, as it should have done to correct the balance. 'It was some time', the brothers remark, 'before a remedy was discovered. This consisted of movable rudders working in conjunction with the twisting of the wings.' So that now three different parts of the machine had to be controlled by wires, worked swiftly and correctly by the operator, to preserve the balance. There were the wing tips which had to be warped. There was the horizontal vane in front which had to be adjusted, to keep the machine in level flight or to bring it to the ground. There was the vertical vane behind which had to be moved this way and that to secure the desired effect from the warping of the wings. 'For the sake of simplicity,' says Wilbur Wright, 'we decided to attach the wires controlling the vertical tail to the wires warping the wings, so that the operator, instead of having to control three things at once, would have to attend to only the forward horizontal rudder and the wing warping mechanism; and only the latter would be needed for controlling lateral balance.'

The thing was done. They had built an aeroplane that could fly; and the later introduction of an engine was as simple a matter as the harnessing of a horse to a carriage. 'With this apparatus', says Wilbur Wright, speaking of the glider of 1902, 'we made nearly seven hundred glides in the two or three weeks following. We flew it in calms and we flew it in winds as high as thirty-five miles an hour. We steered it to right and left, and performed all the evolutions necessary for flight. This was the first time in the history of the world that a movable vertical tail had been used in controlling the direction or the balance of a flying machine. It was also the first time that a movable vertical tail had been used, in combination with wings adjustable to different angles of incidence, in controlling the balance and direction of an aeroplane. We were the first to functionally employ a movable vertical tail in a flying aeroplane. We were the first to employ wings adjustable to respectively different angles of incidence in a flying aeroplane. We were the first to use the two in combination in a flying aeroplane.'

It is a large claim, and every word of it is true. New inventions are commonly the work of many minds, and it would be easy to name at least half a dozen men to whose work the Wrights were indebted. But these were tributaries; the main achievement belongs wholly to the Wrights. Their quiet perseverance, through long years, in the face of every kind of difficulty, is only a part of their distinction; the alertness and humility of mind which refused all traffic with fixed ideas, and made dangers and disappointments the material of education, is what stamps them with greatness. They put themselves to school to the winds. They knew that there is no cheap or easy way to master nature, and that only the human spirit, at its best and highest, can win through in that long struggle. Their patience never failed. 'Skill', says Wilbur Wright, 'comes by the constant repetition of familiar feats rather than by a few overbold attempts at feats for which the performer is yet hardly prepared.' Man must learn to fly as he learns to walk. 'Before trying to rise to any dangerous height a man ought to know that in an emergency his mind and muscles will work by instinct rather than by conscious effort. There is no time to think.'

The machine of 1902, which might be called the victory machine, deserves a full description. It was a double-decked machine, with two planes fixed by struts one above the other about five feet apart. The planes were thirty-two feet in span, and five feet in chord. The total area of their supporting surfaces was about three hundred and five square feet. The operator lay on his face in the middle of the lower plane. The horizontal rudder in front had a supporting surface of fifteen square feet. The vertical tail, as they called it, which was the true rudder, was reduced after trial to six square feet. The machine was supported on the ground by skids, and was very strongly built. It weighed a hundred and sixteen and a half pounds, to which must be added about a hundred and forty pounds for the weight of the operator. It performed about a thousand glides, with only one injury, though it made many hard landings at full speed on uneven ground. The longest glide was 622-1/2 feet, traversed in twenty-six seconds. The glides were made from the Kill Devil sand-hills, near Kitty Hawk--mounds of sand heaped up by the wind, the biggest having a height of a hundred feet.

The time had now come to invite an engine to bear a part in the proceedings. In the autumn of 1903 the brothers returned to Kitty Hawk for their fourth season of experiment. They had built in the winter a machine weighing six hundred pounds, including the operator and an eight horse-power motor. Finding that the motor gave more power than had been estimated, they added a hundred and fifty pounds of weight in strengthening the wings and other parts. The airscrews, built from their own calculations, gave in useful work two-thirds of the power expended. Before trying this machine, however, they continued their practice with the old glider, and made a number of flights in which they remained in the air for over a minute, often soaring for a considerable time in one spot, without any descent at all.

It was late in the season, the 17th of December 1903, when they first tried the power machine. A general invitation to be present at the trial had been given to the people living within five or six miles, but 'not many were willing to face the rigours of a cold December wind in order to see, as they no doubt thought, another flying machine _not_ fly'. Five persons besides the brothers were present. Mr. Orville Wright's narrative, written for the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, must be given in his own words:

'On the morning of December 17th, between the hours of 10.30 o'clock and noon, four flights were made, two by Mr. Orville Wright, and two by Mr. Wilbur Wright. The starts were all made from a point on the levels, and about 200 feet west of our camp, which is located about a quarter of a mile north of the Kill Devil Sand Hill, in Dare County, North Carolina. The wind at the time of the flights had a velocity of twenty-seven miles an hour at 10 o'clock, and 24 miles an hour at noon, as recorded by the anemometer at the Kitty Hawk weather bureau station. This anemometer is 30 feet from the ground. Our own measurements, made with a hand-anemometer at a height of four feet from the ground, showed a velocity of about 22 miles when the first flight was made, and 20-1/2 miles at the time of the last one. The flights were directly against the wind. Each time the machine started from the level ground by its own power alone, with no assistance from gravity or any other sources whatever. After a run of about 40 feet along a mono-rail track, which held the machine eight inches from the ground, it rose from the track and, under the direction of the operator, climbed upward on an inclined course till a height of 8 or 10 feet from the ground was reached, after which the course was kept as near horizontal as the wind gusts and the limited skill of the operator would permit. Into the teeth of a December gale the Flyer made its way forward with a speed of 10 miles an hour over the ground, and 30 to 35 miles an hour through the air. It had previously been decided that, for reasons of personal safety, these first trials should be made as close to the ground as possible. The height chosen was scarcely sufficient for manoeuvring in so gusty a wind and with no previous acquaintance with the conduct of the machine and its controlling mechanisms. Consequently the first flight was short. The succeeding flights rapidly increased in length and at the fourth trial a flight of 59 seconds was made, in which time the machine flew a little more than a half-mile through the air and a distance of 852 feet over the ground. The landing was due to a slight error of judgement on the part of the operator. After passing over a little hummock of sand, in attempting to bring the machine down to the desired height the operator turned the rudder too far, and the machine turned downward more quickly than had been expected. The reverse movement of the rudder was a fraction of a second too late to prevent the machine from touching the ground and thus ending the flight. The whole occurrence occupied little, if any, more than one second of time.

'Only those who are acquainted with practical aeronautics can appreciate the difficulties of attempting the first trials of a flying machine in a 25-mile gale. As winter was already well set in, we should have postponed our trials to a more favourable season, but for the fact that we were determined, before returning home, to know whether the machine possessed sufficient power to fly, sufficient strength to withstand the shock of landings, and sufficient capacity of control to make flight safe in boisterous winds, as well as in calm air. When these points had been definitely established, we at once packed our goods and returned home, knowing that the age of the flying machine had come at last.'