Two days later, the camp grew more crowded still. Octave Chanute and another of his associates, Augustus Herring, arrived, making six now at meals and even closer-packed sleeping accommodations aloft in the rafters. Further, they had brought a triplane hang glider of their own design they wished to test, which consumed far more time and attention than the brothers wished and proved a total failure. After Herring failed several times to get the cumbersome three-wing machine off the ground, Wilbur and Orville each gave it a try and did no better.
Chanute and Herring stayed a week. But Chanute, for all his disappointment in his own glider, understood the importance of what the brothers had achieved, and on his way back to Chicago, during a stopover in Washington, made a point of calling on Samuel Langley to report what he had seen at Kitty Hawk.
As head of the Smithsonian, Langley occupied a spacious office in the institution’s turreted “Castle” on the Mall. He and Chanute were close in age, Langley, sixty-eight, Chanute, seventy-two, more than thirty years older than the Wrights. They were two personages of high reputation and accomplishment, and with their white beards looked every bit the savants they were.
But where Chanute espoused an open exchange of knowledge and ideas among those involved in the quest for flight, Langley maintained extreme secrecy about his efforts. Every aspect of his heavily financed Smithsonian experiments remained confidential. In sharp contrast to the affable Chanute, Langley, a thorough Boston Brahmin, had what his friends kindly termed a “shell of hauteur.”
Since the launching of his pilotless, steam-powered aerodrome in 1896, Langley and his Smithsonian “team” had been at work on a far larger, and again well-financed, version of the same machine, except that this would be powered by a gasoline engine and carry a single operator. Almost no one, other than those directly involved, knew anything about it, just as Langley wished.
Until now Langley had paid little or no attention to the Wrights and their efforts, but hearing all Chanute had to report, he was suddenly quite interested and wrote at once to the brothers to say he would like to come to Kitty Hawk to see for himself. Wilbur and Orville politely declined, but for what reason is unknown.
Lorin, too, soon made his exit, and on October 17, with the help of Spratt, the brothers moved the remodeled glider to Kill Devil Hills to resume testing. The weather by now had turned cold enough that a fire had to be kept burning all night. Rations were down to little more than canned beans. None of this seemed to matter.
When Spratt’s turn came to depart, the brothers were on their own again, and as so often before, with help only from the faithful Bill Tate. In ten days of practice they made more glides than in all the preceding weeks, and increased their record for distance to more than 600 feet. Altogether in two months on the Outer Banks they had made nearly a thousand glides and resolved the last major control problem.
They were elated and would gladly have stayed another several weeks had Bill Tate not long since committed himself to taking charge of a boat and crew at the opening of the fishing season.
They broke camp at first light on October 28 in a cold, driving rain and walked the four miles to Kitty Hawk to start the journey home and in a frame of mind far different from what it had been at their departure the year before. All the time and effort given to the wind tunnel tests, the work designing and building their third machine, and the latest modifications made at Kill Devil Hills had proven entirely successful. They knew exactly the importance of what they had accomplished. They knew they had solved the problem of flight and more. They had acquired the knowledge and the skill to fly. They could soar, they could float, they could dive and rise, circle and glide and land, all with assurance.
Now they had only to build a motor.
Part II
CHAPTER FIVE
December 17, 1903
When we got up a wind of between 20 and 25 miles was blowing from the north. We got the machine out early and put up the signal for the men at the station.
ORVILLE WRIGHT’S DIARY, DECEMBER 17, 1903
I.
With the arrival of the New Year 1903, the outlook in Dayton was more promising than ever. The local population had reached nearly 100,000 and according to the Evening News, an equal number were now finding their way there to do business. It was no town for a pessimist, said the paper, “but if there is any hope for him, here he may breathe the glorious air of prosperity and imbibe the spirit of optimism and be cured.”