Equilibrium—balance—was exactly what riding a bicycle required and of that he and Orville knew a great deal. Well aware of how his father worried about his safety, Wilbur stressed that he did not intend to rise many feet from the ground, and on the chance that he were “upset,” there was nothing but soft sand on which to land. He was there to learn, not to take chances for thrills. “The man who wishes to keep at the problem long enough to really learn anything positively must not take dangerous risks. Carelessness and overconfidence are usually more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks.”
As time would show, caution and close attention to all advance preparations were to be the rule for the brothers. They would take risks when necessary, but they were no daredevils out to perform stunts and they never would be.
Wilbur also assured his father he was taking “every precaution” about his drinking water.
As Bill Tate would later recall, the local people grew increasingly curious about the visitor and the “darn fool contraption” he was sewing, gluing, and tying together.
In the meantime, it had been drawn out of him by adroit questioning that his brother would be down in a couple of weeks. They were going to live in a tent and were going to make some experiments with their contraption in the art of flying.
Outer Banks people were still pretty “set in their ways,” Tate added. “We believed in a good God, a bad Devil, and a hot Hell, and more than anything else we believed that same God did not intend man should ever fly.”
II.
Orville reached Elizabeth City on September 26, having traveled from Dayton without incident or inconvenience. The little delay he had reaching Kitty Hawk was only from lack of wind, and on arrival, again without any inconvenience, he found Wilbur had the “soaring machine” nearly ready.
With everything in place, it consisted of two fixed wings, one above the other, each measuring 5 by 17 feet. In addition it had warping controls and a movable, forward rudder—the “horizontal” rudder or elevator—of 12 square feet. There were no wheels for takeoffs or landings. Instead the machine had wooden skids, far better suited for sand.
The whole apparatus weighed slightly less than 50 pounds. With Wilbur aboard as “operator,” it would total approximately 190 pounds. He would lie flat on his stomach, head first, in the middle of the lower wing and maintain fore-and-aft balance by means of the forward rudder.
Wind would be all-important and contrary to the old Irish wish—“May the wind be ever at your back”—a good wind had to be head-on. As would be said, for the Wrights the winds were never the enemy.
New to such experimental work as they were, the brothers had yet to realize the need for keeping records of all they did. But from their letters home, it appears the experiments began on October 3. “We’ve been having a fine time,” Orville wrote to Katharine on October 14, “altogether we have had the machine out three different days, from 2 to 4 hours each time.”
When, at the start of their experiments, a “terrific wind” was blowing at more than 30 miles an hour, “too strong and unsteady for us to attempt an ascent in it,” they flew their machine like a kite, with lines hanging down to the ground by which they could work the steering apparatus. The greatest difficulty was keeping the glider at a height of no more than 20 feet or so. Even with an ideal wind of 15 to 20 miles an hour, the pull of the kite could be fierce. “It naturally wants to go higher and higher,” Orville explained. “When it begins to get too high, we give it a pretty strong pull . . . to which it responds by making a terrific dart to the ground.” If nothing had been broken, they sent it flying again and photographed it in the air.
Once, after they set the glider on the ground to make “adjustments,” a sudden gust caught one corner and, “quicker than thought,” threw it 20 feet, smashing it to pieces. Orville, who had been standing at a rear corner holding one of the upright spars, was yanked off his feet and landed in a heap 20 feet away, shaken but unharmed.
They photographed the wreckage, then dragged it all back to camp and talked of heading home. But after a night’s sleep, they decided there was hope. Repairing the damage took three days.
As word of what they were up to continued to spread among the local populace, increasing numbers of them could be seen watching from a respectful distance. Bill Tate and several Tate family men and boys were also glad to lend a hand when needed.
The whole time Wilbur and Orville worked together side by side, no less than at home, with the exception of those days when the conditions seemed right to try a manned flight, and then it was Wilbur only who took to the air, if ever so briefly.
He would stand inside an opening in the lower wing, as Orville and Bill Tate stood ready at the wing tips. On signal, all three would take hold and start trotting forward, down the sand slope straight into the wind. Wilbur would hoist himself into position, stretch flat, and grasp the controls. Orville and Tate grabbed hold of the lines attached to the wing to keep the glider from sailing higher than wished.