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.
The operator could cause it to almost skim the ground, following the undulations of its surface, or he could cause it to sail out almost on a level with the starting point, and passing high above the foot of the hill, gradually settle down to the ground.
Further, he had no trouble landing quite smoothly at speeds of 20 miles an hour or more.
Work on the wings had filled the first week of August, during which Octave Chanute arrived on the scene. His protégé Huffaker had only praise for the Wrights. As Wilbur had said earlier in a letter to Bishop Wright, “Mr. Huffaker remarked that he would not be surprised to see history made here in the next six weeks.
Our opinion is not so flattering. He is astonished at our mechanical facility, and as he has attributed his own failures to the lack of this, he thinks the problem solved when these difficulties . . . are overcome, while we expect to find further difficulties of a theoretic nature which must be met by new mechanical designs.
Chanute, too, was greatly impressed by what he saw. He recorded little at the time, however, and apparently had few questions, as different as his own methods had been over the years. For all the time and study he had devoted to the science of gliding, he himself had never physically ventured into the air.
The successful tests flown with the reconstructed wings took place on August 8. The following day Wilbur was back at the controls and in the air once more. But again there were problems, this time of a different and even more troubling kind.
Their wing-warping system of which the brothers were so proud was not responding as expected, and they could not understand why. When the left wing dipped low, while skimming close to the ground for landing, Wilbur had pulled hard on the elevator to no effect. It was like trying to open a barn door in a strong wind. Then suddenly the glider plunged into the sand, throwing him forward through the elevator and leaving him a bruised eye and nose and painful ribs.
Octave Chanute left Kitty Hawk two days later, convinced the Wrights had made more progress and with a larger glider than anyone thus far, and urged them to keep on with their work.
In the days following, it rained without letup, and to add to his miseries Wilbur contracted a cold. George Spratt departed, then Edward Huffaker, but not before helping himself to one of Wilbur’s blankets.
On August 20, Wilbur and Orville, too, said their goodbyes to the Tates and others and were on their way home.
What they talked about on the train heading back to Ohio was neither recorded at the time nor discussed in any detail afterward. Yet it is clear from a few of their later comments that they were as down in spirit about their work as they had ever been, and especially Wilbur.
It was not just that their machine had performed so poorly, or that so much still remained to be solved, but that so many of the long-established, supposedly reliable calculations and tables prepared by the likes of Lilienthal, Langley, and Chanute—data the brothers had taken as gospel—had proven to be wrong and could no longer be trusted. Clearly those esteemed authorities had been guessing, “groping in the dark.” The accepted tables were, in a word, “worthless.”
According to what Orville was to write years later, Wilbur was at such a low point he declared that “not in a thousand years would man ever fly.” Once home, however, according to Katharine, they talked mainly of how disagreeable Edward Huffaker had been.
CHAPTER FOUR
Unyielding Resolve
We had to go ahead and discover everything ourselves.
ORVILLE WRIGHT
I.
The pall of discouragement disappeared in a matter of days, replaced with a surge of characteristic resolve. They would make a fresh start. Wilbur’s gloom on the train was only momentary. As Orville said, “He was at work the following day and it seemed to me was more hopeful and determined than ever.”
“We knew that it would take considerable time and funds to obtain data of our own,” Orville later recounted, “but there was some spirit that carried us through . . .”