Wilbur Wright stepped down into the fetid 100-degree heat of Old Point, Virginia. His suit was wool and melting onto him like a blanket. Most suits were wool in 1900, and his high celluloid collar and black derby were increasing the heat with every second after he left the train, now chugging away. Dayton, Ohio, was a good seven hundred miles behind him. He caught the steamer Pennsylvania for Norfolk, a small, primitive fishing village that was modern in comparison to where he was going.
He checked into the Monticello Hotel and in the morning went looking for some spruce for the spars of his glider. He could find none. Later, Wilbur found some and wrote to his father, “Finally, I bought some white pine and had it sawed up at J. E. Etheridge Co. Mill., the foreman, very accommodating.”1 After securing the pine strips for his glider, which had been crated and shipped to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, he began inquiring about transportation to the Outer Banks. The weather was near 100 degrees, and Wilbur would later write to his father again, “I nearly collapsed.”2
Wilbur slept in the uncomfortable hotel and emerged into an even hotter day with his high laced shoes and dark suit reminding him once again that he was not in Dayton, Ohio, anymore. Another train dropped him off sixty miles south at a salty, desolate stop in Elizabeth City. Now he could smell the ocean. Dragonflies clicked in the tall reeds. Blasts of humid, super-heated air wafted up from the sand. From here all transportation stopped. At least trains did. The Outer Banks of North Carolina was a series of islands protecting the coast from the ravages of the Atlantic Ocean. They were also unreachable by horse or car or any other form of ground transportation. The Albemarle Sound had to be forded to get to Kitty Hawk, and Wilbur could find no one who could tell him how this was to be done. “No one seemed to know anything about the place or how to get there,” he complained to Milton Wright.3
The Civil War had been fought thirty-five years before. The frontier had only been closed for ten years, and parts of the United States were still largely uninhabited. There were no cars to speak of and no radio. Marconi had just pushed wireless to where ships could get updates, but many ships did not use this new technology. The phone was still a new thing for most people, and most of the United States was not electrified.
So, we have the nascent inventor of flight hacking around the desolate town of Elizabeth, in a suit and a tie, unable to get to what would become his laboratory for flight. His high-top leather shoes are muddy, his black derby is an oven, and he can find no transportation to his destination. This should have told him right then and there that Kitty Hawk would be an isolated way-stop on the far peak of the eastern seaboard. If someone had asked him why he was there, then he or she might have thought this overdressed man was insane. “To fly,” he would have answered in perfect seriousness. It was a new century. No self-effacement. No self-deprecation. His grey eyes would bore right through you. “I just need someone to get me across the sound. Is there someone who can do that?” There was.
One grizzled Israel Perry answered the call, not caring why this “dude” would want to go to Kitty Hawk, where one could die and no one would even know it for days. Isolation. That was Kitty Hawk. There were some fishermen and some houses. Most everyone was poor as dirt and barely getting by, and some were eating the dirt or trying to grow what they could not in sand. Shipping fish to the east was the only industry, and that didn't pay so much that people didn't have to plant what they could in the sandy loam to survive.
The next morning, Wilbur was there. “I engaged with Israel Perry on his flat bottom boat,” he related to his father.4 “As it was anchored three miles down the river we started in his skiff which was loaded almost to the gunwale with three men, my heavy trunk and lumber.” The boat was a skiff that stank of dead fish and leaked like a bathtub full of holes. “The boat leaked very badly and frequently dipped water, but by constant bailing we managed to reach the schooner in safety.”5 Wilbur bailed mechanically, methodically, focused on the task in front of him. He asked only one question between the bailing of the green seawater.
“Is this boat seaworthy?”
“Oh, it's safer than the big boat,” Israel sang out, bailing beside him.6
The amount of water had Wilbur bailing the whole three-mile trip down the river. The sun was brutal, and Wilbur was weak from dehydration and having nothing more to eat than some jam his sister had packed for him. There was the scent of salt and the smell of dead fish. The sun glared off the brassy green water. The skiff was leaky and barely seaworthy, but the boat they reached at dusk was not much better. “The weather was very fine with a light west wind blowing. When I mounted the deck of the larger boat I discovered at a glance that it was in worse condition if possible than the skiff. The sails were rotten and the ropes badly worn and the rudder post half rotted off,” Wilbur later wrote.7 “And the cabin was so dirty and vermin infested that I kept out of it from the first to the last.”
To make matters worse, the weather had changed. The sky had darkened, and spiders of lightning touched down across the sound. This added to the general feeling of impending doom the schooner engendered, silhouetted against the dying light. But they headed out into the sound, into the teeth of warm, wet gusts presaging a coming storm.
Wilbur stared across the sound toward Kitty Hawk. It was an island of trees against the storm light. Wind ruffled his pressed shirt and picked at his tie. He frowned at the time, as it was getting dark quickly. His false teeth hurt. His mouth was dry. Lightning spidered again beyond, and thunder rattled the main sail, then a strong gust caught the jib as they leaned to. He later wrote, “Though we had started immediately after dinner, it was almost dark when we passed out of the mouth of the Pasquotank and headed down the sound. The water was much rougher than the light wind would have led us to expect…After a time the breeze shifted to the South and East and gradually became stronger…The waves which were now running quite high struck the boat from below with a heavy shock and threw it back as fast as it went forward.”8
The weather degenerated into a gale after 11 p.m., and Wilbur and a boy who had accompanied Israel bailed for their lives. Leaks appeared in the rotted wood from the constant pitching of the seas, with the boat being driven toward the shore. Any attempt to turn around at this point would invite disaster. Then the foresail suddenly broke loose from the boom and “fluttered to leeward with a terrible roar.”9 There was nothing to do but for Wilbur to go forward with the boy in the dark, in the rain and wind, and secure the sail. He was still in his vest, tie, collar, pressed shirt, and hard shoes. Wilbur inched out toward the front of the boat, with the monster whipping and snapping in the darkness. He and the boy managed to secure the sail with the boat rolling so badly he thought they might tip.
“By the time we had reached a position even with the end of the point it became doubtful whether we would be able to round the light, which lay at the end of the bar extending out a quarter of a mile from the shore.”10 They could not turn in for safety, and then the main sail tore loose from the boom with the same roar of canvas suddenly unmoored. Wilbur again ascended to the top of the careening ship to secure the sail. The gale was tearing Israel's boat apart. The only chance was to use the jib and sail straight toward the sandbar with the wind behind. It was fitting that the boat leading to the epicenter of flight had now become a kite, and the jib would produce thrust that would either sink them or deliver salvation.
Wilbur Wright wondered then what he had done by finding the most remote spot on the eastern seaboard to fly an experimental glider. The older brother of the two men who had created a printing press and a bicycle shop felt the darkness as something bad, something evil, across the dark, windswept bay. He pressed his tongue again against his false teeth. This forty-mile crossing to a place settled by shipwrecked sailors with only some Life-Saving stations and a Weather Bureau station had that same capacity for something going horribly wrong.
In the storied darkness were the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and its people comprised of fishermen and those who had been stranded on the shoals of the barrier islands that protected the coast from the Atlantic. It was a 200-mile strip of sand bent like an elbow at Cape Hatteras. Some fishermen raised corn and beans and kept a few pigs, but the mosquitoes were much better adjusted to the climate than the pigs were. Even the name Kitty Hawk came from a name for the dragonflies that feed on mosquitoes and that the locals called “skeeter hawks.”11 Nags Head was twenty miles to the south, where North Carolinians had been going for a hundred years to escape the heat. Nags Head's only hotel had burned to the ground just a year before Wilbur arrived.
Between Kitty Hawk and Nags Head was four miles of uninterrupted sand that broke for three large dunes known as Kill Devil Hills. It is here that history would be made: a perfect setup for a man with a glider. The only problem was surviving the trip over. There were no bridges in 1900 and of course this was why Wilbur was facing doom in the middle of a gale that was driving the flat-bottomed boat toward a sandbar. The Life-Saving stations and Weather Bureau stations could be of no help, though they had cutting-edge technology with a phone system and a telegraph line that connected the weather station to Norfolk. It was a government line, but telegrams could be sent to the Western Union office. This was a situation that would factor in heavily in 1903.
The problem was that the stations were there to help those whom the Atlantic tossed onto the shoulders of the Outer Banks. Israel Perry's water-laden boat coming from the east and heading toward Kitty Hawk from the Albemarle Sound was not to be rescued. This gave Wilbur no solace as Israel Perry ran his boat up onto a sandbar, with waves breaking over the bow. His high collar had wilted, and his pants were adhered to his long legs. His derby had blown off and wedged in the corner of the bow. He must have questioned the action that had brought him to a leaky boat in a typhoon.
Why had he sent that letter to the Weather Bureau anyway?
We have been doing some experimenting with kites, with a view to constructing one capable of sustaining a man. We expect to carry the experiment further next year. In the meantime, we wish to obtain if possible a report of the wind velocities of Chicago or vicinity for the months of August Sept Oct and November. Do any of the government publications contain such information?12
Scouring the Monthly Weather Reviews, Wilbur found that the wind was at Kitty Hawk. That is where he would go to fly the glider. Then another letter to the Weather Bureau at Kitty Hawk. Might he know of winds, transportation, and lodging? He might. Joseph Dosher, the telegraph operator at the bureau, sealed the deal and described the “mile wide beaches with no trees and clear of high hills for sixty miles to the south.”13 But there were no houses to rent. “So you will have to bring tents…you could obtain board.” His letter had made the rounds in the fishing village, landing in the hands of William Tate, whose wife ran the post office. It was Tate who told him of Kill Devils Hills and the giant sand dunes that would be perfect for his flying machine.
They dragged the boat up onto the sandbar. Wilbur assisted in anchoring the besieged vessel, watching the wild sea pile into the side of Perry's boat. Perry's son kept bailing, and what no one knew was that a hurricane had hit Galveston, Texas, where it had whipped up the water of the Gulf of Mexico to a depth of seventeen feet in the streets. This dying storm had descended on the Outer Banks, and it is amazing that Wilbur Wright and the old fisherman and his son had not been drowned.
After finally making landfall that night, the Curlicue was tied up to a wharf in the quiet village of Kitty Hawk. The houses were few. Mostly there was the darkness and the sand and the roar of the ocean agitated from the passing hurricane. There were no souls to be seen. No lights on in any home or cottage. What would become a resort town fifty years later was still the lone outpost on the edge of the eastern seaboard.
Wilbur stared toward the ocean and felt the steady wind on his face. There was no choice but to bed down on the deck of the Curlicue. Wilbur slept outside with the mosquitoes, quite preferring this to where Israel and his boy slept along with the creatures that had found refuge in the cabin of the old schooner. He lay down on the dried-out wood of the deck. He slapped at a mosquito. He felt the wind and listened to the crash and roar of the ocean. He had traveled eight hundred miles to capture that wind. He loosened his tie. A bicycle mechanic without a high-school degree was lying on the deck of a broken-down ship in the middle of nowhere, having come to solve manned flight. Wilbur Wright sniffed, closed his eyes, then fell fast asleep.
It wasn't three hours later when he woke on the hard deck, feeling pain rippling between his shoulder blades. Israel's snoring from below deck was a throbbing saw that knew no bounds. He and son both had slept in the cabin with the vermin that kept Wilbur outside with the mosquitoes and now facing the blinding-hot sun already baking by 8 a.m. He dug out Katherine's jam and ate some of the sweet strawberries now warmed. It was the only thing he would trust. He looked out from the wharf at Kitty Hawk.
He had seen trees in the distance the night before, but now he saw no trees. He saw sand and a few stumps. Kitty Hawk was composed of a series of houses along the Albemarle Sound, a store, and then the Life-Saving stations along the shore. That was it. The fishing boats headed out from Kitty Hawk or Manateo into the sound and then entered the ocean from the Oregon Inlet. But most people just saw sand stretching forty miles down the coast, broken up by enormous dunes like the three mountains of sand called Kill Devil Hills.
Years later, Orville would describe the area as “like the Sahara or what I imagine the Sahara to be.”14 History abounds in Kitty Hawk. Seventy years later, there would be an outdoor production on the lonely island of Roanoke to commemorate an English colony that mysteriously disappeared. The earliest history goes back to when the explorer Giovanni de Verrazano stumbled upon the Outer Banks and landed at Nags Head woods. He remarked upon the enchantment of the land and kidnapped a native boy to take back to France.
Pirates abounded. The name of a large dune was called Nags Head and Jockey's Ridge, so named for the men who would lead a horse up the giant dune with a lantern tied around its neck. This would trick mariners into thinking that the bobbing light was an inland ship, and they'd run their own ships aground. Cargo and plunder would then be the prize for the land-bound pirates. Blackbeard the pirate had died off the coast of Ocracoke in 1718, and the locals said his decapitated body could be seen swimming around.15
William Tate had warned the Ohioan what he would find and said life in Kitty Hawk was one of “Double Barreled Isolation.”16 Clothes were made at home, children went to school for three months a year, and mail came three times a week. The double-barreled isolation must have excited and repelled Wilbur Wright in 1900; he had a laboratory to conduct his experiments with a steady Atlantic wind and an unbroken landscape of sand for soft landings.
Wilbur left the sleeping Israel and his son and set out for the Tates’. The only problem was he didn't have any idea where the Tate home was. He pulled on his derby, which he had found wedged between the sails, and saw a barefoot boy named Baum with a large straw hat and suspenders. It was September 13, 1900. The boy shut one eye against the sun and nodded. Yes, he knew where the Tates lived, and he would lead him there. Wilbur followed his barefoot guide with his own hard shoes squishing in the sand that was already in his socks, his shirt collar, and even in his mouth.
The boy watched the strange, angular man in the high collar, leather shoes, white shirt, and tie now carrying his suit coat over his arm. He didn't look like anyone the boy had ever seen. Nobody in Kitty Hawk dressed like that and truth was nobody had the money to entertain dressing like that. They were hardscrabble, poor, and just hanging on. In the year 1900, the Kitty Hawkers were people who lived by their wits and went from one job to another. Fishing was the only industry and that was spring and summer, and there was some hunting in the fall. The Life-Saving stations were the only option for men along the coast. Fifty dollars a month if they slept in the stations from December to March.17 It wasn't enough for the risk to their lives when going out into the surf at night in the middle of a gale to rescue men on ships that had run ashore. Between these moments of incredible danger, they walked the beaches with lanterns and shot off flares to warm the ships away from the graveyard of the Atlantic otherwise known as the Outer Banks. But, of course, in this medieval operation of taking a boat into a raging surf, they possessed the only line to the outside world through their phone system and then to the telegraph.
Houses were unpainted, rude structures with leaning porches and floors of unvarnished pine. The Wright home was a palace compared to the Tates’, which now appeared at the end of a sandy lane. It had no rugs, no books, and no furniture to speak of. A dilapidated sign hanging above the door read “Kitty Hawk N.C. Post Office.” A surviving picture shows the Tates as looking like a family from Appalachia or some Depression-era family out of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. But the Tates were better off than most.
William Tate was the unofficial mayor of Kitty Hawk. His wife ran the post office, but he was the actual postmaster. Tate sported many hats: notary public, commissioner of Currituck County. His house was two stories and one of the better, if not one of the best, homes in the area. When Elijah Baum knocked on his door and the man behind him doffed his cap and introduced himself as “Wilbur Wright of Dayton, Ohio,” Tate was well equipped for the task at hand. It had taken Wilbur a week to travel from Dayton to reach Tate's front door. Wilbur must have hidden his shock at the unplastered walls and bare pine floors with the salty scent of the ocean on the man and the home.18 “There may be one or two better houses here but his is much above average,” he would later write his father.19 “A few men have saved up a thousand dollars but this is the savings of a long life. Their yearly income is small. I suppose a few of them see two hundred dollars a year. They are friendly and neighborly and I think there is rarely any real suffering among them.”
Wilbur asked if he might stay there until Orville arrived and they could stake their tent out on the sand dune. The Tates retired to another room and discussed the man in the white shirt and tie. Tate's wife felt their home would not do for such a man.
“I would be happy with whatever accommodations you can provide,” Wilbur said, stepping to the door.20 It was settled. He would stay at the Tates’ until his brother came. After a few days’ rest, William Tate introduced him around to the Kitty Hawkers and the men at the Life-Saving station who would play a crucial role later, in the early flights. The weekly freight boat eventually arrived with Wilbur's large crates. He went back to the wharf and took delivery of his glider, having it transported a half a mile from the Tates’ home to an area overlooking the ocean. He had not been able to find the spruce spars he needed for his glider and had to borrow the Tates’ sewing machine and change the size of the fabric, a white French sateen. He erected a canvas shelter in the Tates’ front yard under which he could work, but the Tates and others woke many times to find in the yard a man wearing a vest and tie with a sewing machine, pumping away with his foot and with needles in his mouth. Years later, a stone marker would be placed to mark the spot where Wilbur worked on his glider.
Tate and his wife, Addie, were the perfect hosts, and Tate would remember later an awed Wilbur Wright recounting his voyage across Albemarle Sound when he first arrived at the Tates’: “His graphic description of the rolling of the boat and his story that the muscles of his arms ached from holding on, were interesting, but when he said he had fasted for 48 hours that was a condition that called for a remedy at once. Therefore, we soon had him seated to a good breakfast of fresh eggs, ham and coffee, and I assure you he did his duty by them.”21
Wilbur Wright could have been an alien from another planet, and it would have been no different. There were no cars on Kitty Hawk. There was no electricity to speak of. There was the telegraph and the phones of the Life-Saving stations. But most people lived an eighteenth-century existence. Yet here was a man who dressed like someone going to a funeral in New York City and who had come to fly into the sky. The notion that Wilbur Wright had come to this primitive outpost to build a machine to fly was the same as someone landing in our vicinity today and declaring he was from another planet. There was no point of comparison, and some Kitty Hawkers who thought he was crazy would take to the woods and stare at the man fitting spars and running material over the frame of wings. Wilbur Wright was an early celebrity and a curiosity; awe, caution, and respect were just some of the emotions the people cut off from the world at large felt when seeing the man dressed always in his Sunday best.
The seventeen-foot wingspan of Wilbur's glider was not to be hidden from the prying eyes of boys, men, or women who had never even seen an automobile, much less a machine designed to ride the air currents. The Tates’ quiet visitor kept to his work and asked for very little, except for a boiled pitcher of water every morning in his bedroom. Orville's near death at the hands of typhoid had forever seared this caution into Wilbur's daily routine. This was the age of typhoid fever, an infection brought on by tainted water. The Tates thought it odd but provided the pitcher every morning. They had no way of knowing Orville Wright had almost died in 1896 from drinking a cup of bad water. Nor that in twelve years Wilbur would be dead from the same strain of salmonella that was behind the hell of Typhoid Mary.
The next day, Wilbur headed out toward the ocean and sat on the sand dunes. The birds held the answers. It was that simple. Understand how a bird flies, and you are almost there. They roll their bodies right or left and then just turn. To bank or lean is the same as a man on a bicycle. But how the birds achieve this is another matter. Only through constant observation could the secret be learned. This had Wilbur sitting on the side of the dune, with the ocean wind ruffling his thin hair that had receded to his crown.
He watched the hawk wheel and look down over the ocean. Still, it did not flap its wings but went even higher, seeing the strip of land that was part of the Outer Banks. The hawk rode in the upward-moving thermals in tight circles. The creature flexed his wings slightly and banked toward the sand dune that spread out into three hills. It was amazing. The hawk glided effortlessly above Wilbur like a god of the air, riding the long, slow, hot drafts of upward-moving air. Wilbur called this soaring.
The hawk saw movement and leaned in and then banked again. It was a man, and the hawk soared above him, passed over, and headed inland. The man scribbled furiously in a notebook as the hawk sailed away, never having to flap his wings. The hawk rode the air as Wilbur wished to do. He rode on what God put there.
Wilbur Wright made a sketch of the hawk. He had to hurry because his brother was coming, and he wanted to meet him at the Tates’. He looked over his notes:
A bird when soaring does not seem to alternately rise and fall as some observers have thought. Any rising and falling is irregular and seems to be due to disturbances of fore and aft equilibrium produced by gusts. In light winds the birds seem to rise constantly without any downward turns.
A bird sailing quartering to the wind seems to always present its wings at a positive angle, although propulsion in such positions seems unaccountable.
No bird soars in a calm.22
The object of the tail is to increase the spread of surface in the rear when the wings are moved forward in light winds and thus preserve the center of pressure at about the same spot. It seems to be used as a rudder very little. In high winds it is folded up very narrow.23
Hawks are better soarers than buzzards but more often resort to flapping because they wish greater speed.
A damp day is unfavorable for soaring unless there is a high wind.24
He had just written Bishop Wright a letter that he wanted to give to Tate to post. “I have my machine nearly finished. It is not to have a motor and is not expected to fly in any true sense of the word. My idea is merely to experiment and practice with a view to solving the problem of equilibrium.”25 Wilbur had already decided that control was everything. While Langley believed in the intrinsic power of the engine to loft a man into the air, Wilbur believed power was secondary: “When once a machine is under proper control under all conditions, the motor problem will quickly be solved. A failure of motor will then mean simply a slow descent and safe landing instead of a disastrous fall.”26
Wilbur then assures his father that he does not intend to take chances:
I do not expect to rise many feet from the ground, and in case I am upset there is nothing but soft sand to strike on…. It is my belief that flight is possible and while I am taking up the investigation for pleasure rather than profit, I think there is a slight possibility of achieving fame and fortune from it. It is almost the only great problem which has not been pursued by a multitude of investigators and therefore carried to a point where further progress is very difficult. I am certain I can reach a point much in advance of any previous person. At any rate, I shall have an outing of several weeks and see a part of the world I have never visited before.27
Wilbur points out immediately that his machine will be better constructed than Lilienthal's and will have more control: “The safe and secure construction and management are my main improvements.”28 It is a foregone conclusion that he, not his brother, will be doing the flying in the glider. The glider had a wingspan of 17 feet, 5 inches, with a total weight of 50 pounds. Wilbur would lie “in a cutout section of the lower wing with his feet resting on the T bar controlling wing warping.”29 It would be the father, Milton, who would have the final word. He demanded that the brothers be equal, and this would include the early experiments in Kitty Hawk. But, years later, he would write to Wilbur in France: “I think that aside from the value of your life to yourself and to ourselves you owe it to the world that you should avoid all unnecessary personal risks. Your death or even becoming an invalid would seriously affect the progress of aeronautical science. Outside of your contacts and your aviations, you have much that no one else can do as well. And, alone, Orville would be crippled and burdened.”30
When his father wrote these words, it was at a time when Wilbur and Orville were at their pinnacle of fame. They were the Wright Brothers, equal before the world, yet Milton knew that Wilbur was the one who broke the code of flight. Orville would receive no such letter, and the bishop followed up with a letter to Katherine during this period that was somewhat cruel but showed his true feelings toward his sons: “It does not make much difference with you, but Wilbur ought to keep out of all balloon rides. Success seems to hang upon him.”31 The best he could say of Orville was that “his mind grew steadily.”32
This may be damning with faint praise, but the reason to bring it up is that with Orville's arrival in Kitty Hawk the grand plurality began. The “I” would be replaced with “we” from now on in Wilbur's letters to both his father and Chanute. The other Wright brother knocked on William Tate's door on September 28, 1900. Tate must have thought he was seeing double. Here was another man in a high collar, tie, dark coat, cap, and mustache, looking like he just stepped out of an office in the city. He wore the same shined, hard-sole shoes and spoke with the same Dayton twang that came through the nose when the voice came through at all.
Tate opened the door wide and admitted the man, who was “equipped with a tent and cots, as well as coffee, tea, sugar, and a few other items unavailable in Kitty Hawk.”33 Wilbur met his brother, and who knows what Tate thought of the two men who said little but shook hands affectionately. Wilbur had been gone a good deal of the time working on his flying machine out by the camp he had established that would have a tent and cots and food and would become their home. Orville did stay with Wilbur at the Tates’ a few days until the glider was completed. While they worked, Wilbur and Orville observed the local birds and had made many notes. A local man named John T. Daniels would later write, “They would watch the gannets and imitate the movements of their wings with their arms and hands…. We thought they were crazy.”34
Their camp on the edge of the dunes began on October 3. Orville's letters then began, and many were to their sister, Katherine, concerning the conditions of the camp. They suffered through several storms: “When one of these 45-mile Northeasters strikes us, you can depend on it, there is little sleep in our camp. We have just passed through one which took two or three wagonloads of sand from the NE end of our tent and piled it up eight inches on the flying machine, which we had anchored about fifty feet southwest. The wind shaking the roof and sides of the tent sounds exactly like thunder. When we crawl out to fix things the sand fairly blinds us.”35
Kitty Hawk was a desolate outpost and, like all remote areas in 1900, there was a lack of items the Wrights took for granted in Dayton. Besides being out of communication with the world except by mail that went out only three times a week, basic foodstuffs were lacking as well—to say nothing of getting parts for a flying machine. The Wrights were pushing known technology to its very limit in an area of the country that resembled America in the early nineteenth century. This was confirmed by Orville in a letter sent later to his sister: “There is no store in Kitty Hawk, that is, not anything you would call a store. Our pantry in its most depleted state would be a mammoth affair compared with our Kitty Hawk stores. Our camp alone exhausts the output of all the henneries within a mile…they [residents] never had anything good in their lives and consequently are satisfied with what they have. In all other things they are the same way, satisfied with keeping soul and body together.”36
Orville then makes an interesting observation, connecting their quest to fly with the age of exploration: “Trying to camp down here reminds me constantly of those poor Artic explorers. We are living nearly the whole time on reduced rations…. We have appointed the Kitty Hawk storekeeper our agent to buy us anything he can get hold for, in any quantities he can get in the line of fish, eggs, wild geese or ducks. We have had biscuits [with] molasses, coffee and rice today. Tomorrow morning, we will have biscuits, coffee, and rice.”37
Tommy Tate, the sixteen-year-old nephew of William Tate, took to hanging around the camp while the brothers readied their glider. He told the brothers that the richest man in town was the druggist, Doc Cogswell, a man owed $15,000 by his brother. The arrival of the freight ship from Elizabeth City was eagerly looked for by Kitty Hawkers, and the Wright brothers, as they could then “have a blowout” with “canned tomatoes, peaches, condensed milk, flour and bacon and butter.”38 But it would usually only last a day, and they were back to existing on subsistence fare. “Will is most starved,” Orville would write their sister when rations were low.39
The mosquitoes, chiggers, and ticks, and the sand blowing constantly, did not diminish their love for their newfound oasis. Both Wrights came to believe in time that the fresh air, beauty, and stress-free environment of Kitty Hawk could cure all ills. Orville would write Katherine, “The sunsets here are the prettiest I have seen. The clouds light up in all colors in the background, with deep blue clouds of various shapes fringed with gold before. The moon rises in much the same style and lights up this pile of sand almost like day.”40
Wilbur, on the other hand, also saw Kitty Hawk as nothing short of his laboratory, an unencumbered space where he would not be bothered by the world to get his work done. This was harder and harder in Dayton, where the bicycle business demanded attention and, increasingly, so did his father. Milton was in a legal tussle with his church that would require Wilbur to veer away from his work on aeronautics and all things related to flying. But in Kitty Hawk all cares were distant. The isolation provided a wall that would later be recognized by people who would make it their once-a-year vacation spot and would swear to the beauty, the climate, and the wide-open beaches.
But it was roughing it for the two men in high collars and ties in a tent at the bottom of a giant sand dune. As Orville would write his sister, “The sand is the greatest thing in Kitty Hawk and soon will be the only thing.”41 The days were brutally hot, and the nights cold. “A cold nor'easter is blowing tonight and I have seen warmer places than it is in this tent. We each of us have two blankets, but almost freeze every night,” Orville wrote his sister.42 “The wind blows in on my head, and I pull the blankets up over my head, when my feet freeze and I reverse the process. I keep this up all night and in the morning am hardly able to tell where I'm at in the bedclothes.”
One month after arriving in Kitty Hawk, the glider was finally ready and the storms had abated. “With everything in place, it consisted of two fixed wings, one above the other, each measuring 5 feet by 17 feet. In addition, it had warping controls and a movable forward rudder—the horizontal rudder or elevator—of twelve square feet. There were no wheels for takeoffs or landings. Later models would have wooden skids, far better suited for sand…. The whole apparatus weight slightly less than 50 pounds…. With Wilbur aboard as ‘operator’ it would total approximately 190 pounds…. He would lie flat on his stomach, head first, in the middle of the lower wing and maintain fore-and-aft balance by means of the forward rudder.”43
The problem was even though the storms had passed, the winds still clocked in around 30 miles per hour. Orville wrote his sister, Katherine, “Monday night and all-day Tuesday we had a terrific wind blowing 36 miles an hour. Wednesday morning the Kitty Hawkers were out early peering around the edge of the woods and out their upstairs windows to see whether our camp was still in existence.”44 Wilbur decided then to fly the machine like a kite and steer it by remote control with strings to the ground. He put chains on the kite to see how it would perform with an operator. Orville reported to Katherine: “Well after erecting a derrick from which to swing our rope with which we fly the machine, we sent it up about 20 feet, at which height we attempt to keep it up by the manipulation of the strings to the rudder. The greatest difficulty is in keeping it down. It naturally wants to go higher and higher. When it gets too high we give it a strong pull on the ducking string, to which it responds by making a terrific dart to the ground.”45
They then sent it back up and took some pictures. The kite experiments came to a stop with a wind that “quicker than thought”46 caught the kite on the ground and lifted it in to the air, sending it cartwheeling for twenty feet. The damage was extensive, and at first glance Wilbur deduced that the experiments at Kitty Hawk had come to an end; then he decided it might be repairable. They photographed the wreckage and then dragged it back to camp, where for three days they repaired the damage.
Wilbur wanted to fly now. He had heard of a place where the wind was strong and the dunes even larger. Orville, in the close of one his letters, tipped his sister off to the name of some hills that would live in history: “We will probably go down to the Kill Devil Hills tomorrow, where we will try gliding on the machine.”47