He headed first to the home of William Tate, the former Kitty Hawk postmaster with whom he had corresponded.
In all, Kitty Hawk comprised perhaps fifty houses, nearly all the homes of fishermen, and Tate, too, made most of his living that way three months of the year, beginning in October when the fish were running. As he would later write, “The community of Kitty Hawk at that time was a hardy race, chiefly descendants of shipwrecked sailors whom storm and misfortune had cast upon the shores of the North Carolina coast.” He himself was the son of a shipwrecked Scotsman. The life there, Tate stressed, was one of “double-barreled ISOLATION.”
Houses had little in the way of furniture. Their bare floors were kept clean by scrubbing with white sand. Families raised most of what they ate in small vegetable gardens while the “men-folk” hunted all they could. Clothes were hand-sewn and most everyone got by with just two or three changes of clothes—“one for special occasions,” it was said, “and then one on one day and one on the next.” Mail came about three times a week. Children went to school about three months a year, and no one, it seemed, knew what a vacation was.
Tate and his wife, Addie, gave the visitor the warm greeting he had promised, and Wilbur, as Tate remembered, “proceeded to unfold a tale of hardship” about his trip from Elizabeth City. “He was a tenderfoot and of course had a tale of woe to tell.
His graphic description of the rolling of the boat and his story that the muscles of his arms ached from holding on, were interesting, but when he said he had fasted for 48 hours that was a condition that called for a remedy at once. Therefore we soon had him seated to a good breakfast of fresh eggs, ham and coffee, and I assure you he did his duty by them.
When Wilbur asked if he might board there temporarily until his brother arrived, the Tates excused themselves to confer in the next room, but without closing the door. Hearing Addie say she was not sure their home would do for such a nicely dressed visitor, Wilbur stepped to the door to tell them he would be quite happy with whatever accommodations they could provide.
In a long letter to his father, Wilbur described the Tate home as an unpainted, two-story frame house with no plaster on the walls, “no carpets at all, very little furniture, no books or pictures.” For Kitty Hawk, this was above the average.
A few men have saved a thousand dollars, but this is the saving of a long life. . . . I suppose a few of them see two hundred dollars a year. They are friendly and neighborly and I think there is rarely any real suffering among them.
Beside fishing, they tried to grow their own beans and corn. As there appeared to be nothing but sand, Wilbur thought it a wonder they could grow anything.
Until Orville’s arrival, Wilbur worked at setting up camp on a good-sized hill half a mile from the Tate house, overlooking the water. That done, he began preparing their glider, most of his efforts taken up with a change in the wingspan from 18 to 17 feet, because of his failure to find the spruce spars needed and having to be satisfied with the pine substitutes that were two feet shorter. As a result the fabric for the wings—a beautiful white French sateen—had also to be cut back in size and resewn. To accomplish this he borrowed Addie Tate’s sewing machine of the kind one pumped by foot.
In another letter to the Bishop, he tried to describe what the glider amounted to, stressing that it was to have no motor but depend on the wind only, that the central objective was to solve the problem of balance, and that he knew exactly what he was about, both in building the glider and what he expected to achieve with the tests to come. All this was remarkably clear and concise, and, as time would show, a stunning example of extraordinary prescience.
I have my machine nearly finished. It is not to have a motor and is not expected to fly in any true sense of the word. My idea is merely to experiment and practice with a view to solving the problem of equilibrium. I have plans which I hope to find much in advance of the methods tried by previous experimenters. When once a machine is under proper control under all conditions, the motor problem will be quickly solved. A failure of a motor will then mean simply a slow descent and safe landing instead of a disastrous fall.