At the end of August came an invitation from Octave Chanute for Wilbur to address the Western Society of Engineers in Chicago on the subject of gliding experiments. It was his first request to speak in public, and he was extremely reluctant to accept, feeling the date set, September 18, left too little time to prepare anything of substance. But Katharine “nagged” him into going. That Wilbur might prove a poor speaker seems never to have entered her thoughts.
Only days later, in the first week of September, came the shocking news that President William McKinley had been shot by an insane anarchist named Leon Czolgosz, while attending the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo, New York. For days he was at death’s door. “McKINLEY IS DYING,” read the large headline across the front page of the Dayton Free Press on September 13. The following morning, he was dead, and that same day at Buffalo, young Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office as the twenty-sixth president of the United States.
William McKinley had been “Ohio’s own.” Born in Ohio, he had served through the Civil War in the 23rd Ohio Volunteer Regiment, married an Ohio girl, served long as an Ohio congressman and for two terms as the governor of Ohio. In Dayton, the day of his death, thousands of people filled the streets downtown. The scene was like nothing in the city’s history. Fire bells tolled. The courthouse and other public buildings were quickly and heavily draped in black.
The Wright brothers, it appears, kept working as hard as ever at the shop, possibly as a way of coping with the tragedy. For Wilbur there was the added pressure of preparing his lecture. The morning he boarded the train for Chicago, September 18, Dayton was still shrouded in black, as McKinley was not to be buried for another two days.
Orville and Katharine having decided that Wilbur’s wardrobe was insufficient for so important a public debut, he went off, as Katharine recorded, “arrayed in Orv’s shirt, collars, cuffs, cuff-links, and overcoat.” Never had he looked “so ‘swell.’?”
How he felt was another matter. Octave Chanute had written to inquire whether he would mind if the meeting of the society was designated “Ladies’ Night.” Wilbur had replied it was not for him to decide. “I will already be as badly scared as it is possible for a man to be.” Asked by Katharine and Orville whether his talk would be scientific or witty, he said, “Pathetic.”
Arriving in Chicago, he went directly to Chanute’s three-story brownstone on Huron Street to dine with Chanute prior to the speech and was relieved to find his host as cordial as ever and the kind of man whose top-floor, private study was so chock-full of models of flying machines and stuffed birds he could hardly get into it himself.
The gathering of some fifty society members and their wives convened at the Monadnock Building at eight o’clock. In his brief introduction Chanute spoke of the advances made in aerial navigation by “two gentlemen from Dayton, Ohio” bold enough to attempt things neither he nor Otto Lilienthal had dared try.
The speech Wilbur delivered—modestly titled “Some Aeronautical Experiments”—would be quoted again and again for years to come. Published first in the society’s journal, it appeared in full or part in The Engineering Magazine, Scientific American, the magazine Flying, and the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. In the words of a latter-day aeronautics specialist at the Library of Congress, the speech was “the Book of Genesis of the twentieth-century Bible of Aeronautics.”
It was authentic Wilbur Wright, straightforward and clear. What was needed above all for success with a flying machine, he said, was the ability to ride with the wind, to balance and steer in the air. To explain how a bird could soar through the air would take much of the evening, he said. Instead he took a sheet of paper, and, holding it parallel to the floor, let it drop. It would not “settle steadily down as a staid, sensible piece of paper ought to do, but it insists on contravening every recognized rule of decorum, turning over and darting hither and thither in the most erratic manner, much after the style of an untrained horse.” This was the kind of horse, he said, that men had to learn to manage in order to fly, and there were two ways:
One is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast a while, and then retire to the house and at leisure figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safest, but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders.
If one were looking for perfect safety, he said, one would do well to sit on the 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.”