KILL DEVIL HILLS, NORTH CAROLINA
The best-funded aeronaut in America went into the Potomac twice. Nine days later two brothers from a bicycle shop flew.
n the autumn of 1903 the smart money on flight was on Samuel Langley. He ran the Smithsonian Institution. He had fifty thousand dollars from the War Department, more from private donors, a machine shop, a crew, and a houseboat on the Potomac to launch from. In October his Aerodrome went off the catapult and straight into the river. In December it did it again, and the newspapers declared the whole business finished.
They built the wind tunnel in the back of the shop and tested two hundred wings by hand through the winter.
Nine days after the second dunking, on a cold beach below the dunes at Kill Devil Hills, two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, flew. Wilbur and Orville Wright ran a bicycle shop on West Third Street. They had no degrees and no backers. Their whole outlay on the project, train fare to the Outer Banks included, came to something under a thousand dollars of their own money.
It was not luck. Two years earlier their glider had refused to lift the way the published tables said it would. Everyone in the field was using the same tables. The brothers concluded the tables were wrong. They built a six-foot wind tunnel in the back of the shop, cut some two hundred small wings from sheet metal, and tested every one of them by hand through the winter of 1901. Their figures replaced the ones the world had trusted for a century.
They had also decided that the problem was not power. Every rival was chasing a bigger engine. The Wrights had watched buzzards over the Miami River and understood that the hard part was control, keeping a machine level in air that never holds still. They solved it by twisting the wingtips, proved the idea on gliders for three seasons, and only then bolted on a small motor they had built themselves, because no manufacturer would sell them one light enough.
The first flight of December 17 lasted twelve seconds and covered a hundred and twenty feet. The fourth that morning ran eight hundred and fifty-two feet in fifty-nine seconds. Five people watched. The brothers wired their father and asked him to inform the press. Most of the press did not bother.
Trust your own measurements. Solve the actual problem rather than the impressive one. If the instrument does not exist, build it. Then go down to the beach and try.
Photograph: John T. Daniels, Library of Congress, 1903
