By morning, however, their characteristic resolve returned. The demon mosquitoes had diminished appreciably and in the days to come grew fewer still. But the torment they had been through would never be forgotten.
As it happened, one of the two men Octave Chanute wished to have join the brothers in their experiments had arrived just as the mosquitoes struck and so shared in the miseries. He was Edward Huffaker of Chuckey City, Tennessee, a former employee of the Smithsonian Institution and author of a Smithsonian pamphlet, On Soaring Flight. Now a protégé of Chanute, he had brought with him a disassembled glider of his own design built at Chanute’s expense. To Wilbur and Orville he seemed at first a welcome addition.
The second to join the group, young George Alexander Spratt from Coatesville, Pennsylvania, had little in the way of appropriate background for the work at hand. Chanute had described him as having medical training that could prove valuable in case of an accident, but Spratt had abandoned his medical ambitions after finishing medical school several years before. About all he could offer as reason for his participation was that flying had been the dream of his life, which was altogether true. He arrived in the last days of the mosquito siege.
The hangar-workshop at Kill Devil Hills was now to provide lodging for four. As the chief cook, Orville arranged a corner kitchen with a gas stove fashioned out of a metal barrel and shelves lined with canned goods—Arm & Hammer baking soda, Chase & Sanborn coffee, Royal Purple Hand-Packed tomatoes, Gold Dust Green Gage plums. Fresh butter, eggs, bacon, and watermelon had to be carried on foot from Kitty Hawk.
Huffaker expressed amazement at the brothers’ “mechanical facility” but was to prove increasingly irksome to them, lazy and indifferent about such daily necessities as washing dishes. He was also inclined to make use of the personal possessions of the others without bothering to ask permission. As tiresome as anything for the sons of Bishop Wright was to hear Huffaker go on about “character building,” rather than hard work, being the great aim in life. The more they learned about the glider he had designed and planned to test but never did, the more they considered it a joke.
Spratt, by contrast, helped every way he could and was excellent company.
On July 27, with the glider at last ready, the experiments began. The day was clear, the wind at Kill Devil Hills, about 13 miles an hour. Besides Huffaker and Spratt, Bill Tate and his half-brother Dan were on hand to assist.
Wilbur was to do all the gliding. As they made ready for the first launch into the wind, Orville and Spratt positioned themselves at the corners. Expectations were high.
But no sooner was the machine up than it nosed straight into the ground only a few yards from where it started. Wilbur, it seemed, had positioned himself too far forward. In a second try, having shifted back a bit, he did no better. Finally, after several more failed attempts, he moved back nearly a foot from where he started and sailed off more than 100 yards.
To all present but Wilbur and Orville this flight seemed a huge success. To the brothers it was disappointing. The machine had not performed as expected, not, in fact, as well as the one of the year before. Wilbur had had to use the full power of the rudder to keep from plowing into the ground or rising so high as to lose headway. Something was “radically wrong.”
In a glide later the same day, the machine kept rising higher and higher till it lost all headway, exactly “the fix” that had plunged Otto Lilienthal to his death. Responding to a shout from Orville, Wilbur turned the rudder to its full extent and only then did the glider settle slowly to the ground, maintaining a horizontal position almost perfectly, and landing with no damage or injury.
Wilbur went again. And again. Several times the same experience was repeated and with the same result. On one glide the machine even began to drift backward.
“The adjustments of the machine are away off,” Orville explained to Katharine. The curvature, or “camber,” of the wings, from the leading edges to the rear, was too great and had to be changed. It was this that concerned them the most, the ideal camber, or curve, of the wing from its leading to its trailing edge, being that which gave the wing the most lift against the pull of gravity. What was so troubling was that the ratio they had gone by was exactly what Lilienthal had recommended, about 1 to 12, whereas for their glider of the year before, Machine No. 1, the brothers had used a ratio of 1 to 22.
They stopped gliding for several days to rebuild—flatten—the wings back to a camber close to what it had been in 1900, and with fine results. Photographs were taken of Wilbur soaring through the air exactly as wished. He himself would write, “The machine with its new curvature never failed to respond promptly to even small movements of the rudder.