Wilbur Wright returned from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where he had flown tethered, with Orville and William Tate holding ropes to keep the wings stable, and then had flown untethered. Wilbur had now joined Lilienthal as one of the few men to know the feeling of leaving the earth and floating on the air. The German Lilienthal must have had magical moments of elation as he soared in his glider, kicking his legs one way and then the other to make turns and to remain stable. Wilbur, Lilienthal, and a few others had managed to fly—if only for seconds. The man who had returned to a bicycle business in need of attention, a frazzled sister, and a demanding father, now had a bigger problem. He had left the earth and flown…but he wanted to do it again.

If Wilbur had failed, then there might have been a turning away, although like Teddy Roosevelt who would become president that year, Wilbur Wright seemed destined for something greater. The taste of flight was too much to put the genie back in the bottle. Like the addict who has had just a taste, Wilbur wanted to return as quickly as possible to Kitty Hawk. But first he had to understand what had happened in the hot sands of the Outer Banks. He needed to go back to the school of one, and that did not involve his brother Orville.

Wilbur did not sit down with Orville and theorize. Orville was a mechanic, but Wilbur needed to understand how the gilder flew, how he could control it, and how he could improve on it. He was the visionary, the savant who had to get to the top of the mountain, and he could not find that path by talking with his brother. He needed someone else, an intellect equal to his in knowledge, inquisitive reasoning, and logic—and at least as up to date on the latest aeronautical data.

What exactly had happened on the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk? Wilbur had loaded the glider with a fifty-pound chain and flown it. He had flown off of Kill Devil Hills. They had run around in the sand and chased the glider thrown off the edge of the dune. He had built a glider above his bicycle shop, and then he had lain down on the wings and flown for several minutes combined. Now he was sunburned and tired, and the regular world demanded attention. Wilbur was not unlike an astronaut returning from a trip into space.

So he had returned and taken the bicycle business in hand and suffered through Milton's admonishments to keep a warm and happy home for him. Katherine was relieved of her duties and could focus on teaching, and Orville was once more engaged as the bicycle entrepreneur; now Wilbur could sit in the parlor with the Gibson clock and pick up pen and paper and write to the one man who could help him, Octave Chanute:

In October my brother and myself spent a vacation of several weeks at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, experimenting with a soaring machine. We located on the bar which separates Albemarle Sound from the ocean. South of Kitty Hawk the bar is absolutely bare of vegetation and flat as a floor, from sound to ocean, for a distance of nearly five miles, except a sand hill one hundred and five feet high…. It is an ideal place for gliding experiments except of its inaccessibility. The person who goes there must take everything he will possibly need, for he cannot depend on getting any needed article from the outside world in less than three weeks.1

What is the significance of this correspondence between the seventy-year-old engineer and the thirty-two-year-old bicycle mechanic? It is the school of one. As Tom Crouch summarizes in The Bishop's Boys, “From the time of Wilbur's first note of May 13, 1900, to Chanute's last on May 14, 1910, a total of 435 letters would pass between them. The sheer bulk of the exchange was extraordinary, averaging one letter every eight or nine days over an entire decade.”² And these letters were not between Chanute and the Wright brothers. These letters were between Wilbur Wright and Octave Chanute. The Papers of the Wright Brothers include many of them, and they are striking in their length, their breadth, and the density of the discussion. It was a seminar of early aeronautics, and the pupil in the beginning was Wilbur; and then it became a seminar of two equals trying to find the answer to a riddle in a dark coal mine. In all the Wright–Chanute correspondence, there is but one letter between Octave Chanute and Orville Wright, and it centers on travel logistics. The rest are all between Wilbur and Octave. Historians have treated this by saying that Wilbur was a better writer than the profoundly shy Orville. This is ridiculous since Orville was the primary letter writer from Kitty Hawk on all matters to his sister, Katherine. The truth is, Wilbur had his hand on the pulse of his quest to fly, and he is the one who had the questions, the data, and the theories that would fly back and forth between the two men. Wilbur possessed the hot light of invention that demanded some kindred spirit to talk with, compare, inquire, and at times empathize with on the head-numbing audacity that would push a man with no degrees, no credentials, and no real successes to think he could be the one to solve what others could not.

And so, Wilbur sat down and wrote his letter on November 16, 1900: “We began experiments by testing the machine as a kite and found that a wind of twenty-five miles would more than support it with an operator on it.” Wilbur then described his glider and gave the results of their gliding tests. He explained the logic behind the operator lying down: “We had intended to have the operator turn his body to an upright position before landing but a few preliminary tests having shown that it was feasible to let the machine settle down upon its lower surface with the operator maintaining his recumbent position, we used this method of landing entirely.”3

Everything was new. No one knew how a man should even sit in a flying machine. Should someone sit up as if in a parlor or a car, or should someone lie down and decrease the drag upon the body? What was safer and more efficient? Wilbur was convinced that the correct way to fly was to lie down: “And although in appearance it was a dangerous practice we found it perfectly safe and comfortable except for flying in sand.”⁴ Who else but Chanute could he tell this to and get approval or disapproval? Wilbur needed a sounding board with someone who could show him the way and then set him free to find the answers. He described for the old scientist his method of experimentation:

Our plan of operation was for the aeronaut to lie down on the lower plane while two assistants grabbed the ends of the machine and ran forward till the machine was supported on the air. The fore and aft equilibrium was in entire control of the rider, but the assistants ran beside the machine and pressed down the end which attempted to rise…. The speed rapidly increased until the runners could no longer keep up.5

The aeronaut was Wilbur, of course, with Orville and William Tate running alongside. Chanute wrote back immediately: “I thank you much for your letter of 16th which I have found deeply interesting and I congratulate you heartily upon your success in diminishing the resistance of the framing and demonstrating that the horizontal position for the operator is not as unsafe as I believed.”⁶ Then Chanute asked for permission to include the results of the Kitty Hawk trip in an article in Cassier's Magazine. This was quite a validation for Wilbur, yet we see in his reply his quest for secrecy and to some degree paranoia. This was the self-knowledge that he possessed, the ability to discover the secrets of flight: “We will gladly give you your own information or anything you may wish to know, but for the present would not wish any publication in detail of the methods of operation or construction of the machine.”⁷

Octave Chanute then proposed a visit to Dayton and included the article he intended to publish for Wilbur's approval. “I have lately been asked to prepare an article for Cassiers Magazine and I should like your permission to allude to your experiments in such brief and guarded way as you may indicate.”⁸ There followed two letters about load and lift coefficients. Wilbur sent him several photos of flying the glider as a kite to use in the article, and Chanute promised an anemometer (to measure wind speed) for Wilbur to use in his next trip to Kitty Hawk.

Wilbur then wrote him about a return to Kitty Hawk with a new glider: “Our plans call for a trip of about six or eight weeks in September and October at the same locality we visited last year on the North Carolina Coast. We will erect a frame building 16 ft by 25 ft to house the machine in. The glider itself will be built on exactly the same general plan as our last years [sic] machine but will be larger and of improved construction in its detail.”⁹ Wilbur then invited Chanute to Kitty Hawk: “It is scarcely necessary to say that it would give us the greatest pleasure to have you visit us while in camp if you should find it possible to do so.”¹⁰

For an intensely private man like Wilbur, this showed the amount of respect he had for Chanute and his desire to keep their relationship strong and the information flowing back and forth. Wilbur Wright needed Octave Chanute, and some could argue that Octave Chanute needed Wilbur, but this would come later in the relationship. Wilbur then did something very singular. He published two articles of his own in June 1901, the first under the title “Angle of Incidence.”11 He wrote the article and sent it to the editor of the Aeronautical Journal, who quickly published it. Wilbur wrote, “If the term ‘angle of incidence,’ so frequently used in aeronautical discussions, could be confined to a single definite meaning, viz the angle at which the airplane and wind actually meet, much error and confusion would be averted.”¹² It is a highly technical article on aeronautics by a newcomer to the game but who is instantly taken seriously. This was Wilbur Wright's first notice to the world of his experiments at Kitty Hawk.

The second article, “The Horizontal Position During Gliding Flight,” was published in a German magazine.¹³ He included a photograph of the 1900 glider being flown as a kite.

All who are concerned with aerial navigation agree that the safety of the operator is more important to successful experimentation than any other point. The history of past investigations demonstrates that greater prudence is needed rather than greater skill. Only a madman would propose taking greater risks than the great constructors of earlier times…. The principal advantages of the upright position are obviously in starting and landing. Once in the air, many disadvantages become evident…. The experiments which my brother and I conducted were carried out at the seashore where sand hills rise on the sloping plain.¹⁴

The article wades into the debate on pilot position, with Wilbur arguing against the Lilienthal model again and advocating for the recumbent position as the best position of control. The point is Orville did not write these first two articles on what happened in Kitty Hawk. Wilbur wrote the articles and announced to the world that he was doing flying experiments. He does mention his brother, but the fact is Wilbur published these articles that put forth his thesis on flying. There can only be one author even though the plural “we” is now being used; the thrust of a letter to Octave Chanute is that of an inventor relaying his discoveries:

Our final estimate of its soaring speed was twenty-two miles. We soon found that our arrangements for working the front rudder and twisting the planes were such that it was very difficult to operate them simultaneously…two minutes [sic] trial was sufficient to prove the efficiency of twisting the planes to achieve lateral balance…. Our rudder had an area of twelve square feet, and it was our sole means of guiding and balancing longitudinally. We never found it necessary to shift the body.15

One thing to note here: Wilbur was announcing that his discovery of wing warping as a means of controlling the airplane was a success. It would be the first time wing warping is mentioned, and Chanute lost no time in responding and suggesting a meeting: “I shall hope to meet you either here or in Dayton to obtain further details and to compare calculations of lift and resistances. If your machine is not irretrievable I would much like to see it.”¹⁶

Clearly Octave Chanute saw something in Wilbur Wright, who had just gone down and flown a glider kite at Kitty Hawk. He saw a kindred spirit and an intellectual equal. Chanute then wrote that he was coming to Dayton that summer; Chanute, the renowned engineer, was not coming to visit Orville Wright. He was coming to see the man with whom he had been corresponding about the best way to crack the Gordian knot of flight. He was coming to see Wilbur Wright.