During the same time that Octave Chanute was preparing to meet with Wilbur Wright, the assassin Leon Czolgosz had been living on his parents’ farm and had been converted to the new radical movement, anarchism. He might have had a nervous breakdown, but he emerged determined to go see charismatic speaker and writer Emma Goldman and learn more about being an anarchist. Then he left to go kill the president. President William McKinley was walking the grounds of the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. A young man was walking toward him, and McKinley raised his arm to shake the man's hand. Czolgosz's concealed revolver fired twice, with one bullet grazing the president and the second burrowing into his abdomen.1 McKinley would be dead three days later from gangrene, and, at the age of forty-two, Vice President Teddy Roosevelt would become the youngest president in history. He matched the mood of the young nation: cocky and assured, a cowboy looking for the next great moment that was sure to come in the new century.

Change was in the air.

Secretary Samuel Charles Pierpont Langley had emerged as the king of flight, at least in his mind. His steam-powered model had flown, and the coffers of the Smithsonian Institute had been opened to him. He would produce the most expensive plane so far in man's attempt to fly. He was convinced that now it was all just propulsion. His model had flown well enough and circled the boat and landed on the water just fine. Control had been conquered. Just build a bigger model and put a man inside of it. The problem was that steam was out as an engine. He needed something more powerful.

“All sorts of contrivances have been proposed,” Octave Chanute wrote in the Journal of Western Engineers as far back as 1897, “reaction jets of steam or compressed air, the explosion of gunpowder or even nitro glycerin, feathering paddle wheels of varied design, oscillating fins acting like the tails of fish, wings like the pinions of birds, and the rotating screw.”2 Langley had settled on the screw, and he determined that a gasoline engine would be powerful enough to drive it and put his craft in the air. He soon had Charles Manley building the most powerful engine in the world.

Meanwhile, Glenn Curtiss was working on that very problem. Glenn liked to draw in the dirt. That was how he worked out problems a lot of the time. His brow would come down, his bushy eyebrows would move forward, and his mouth would be slightly pursed, like some old character out of a William Faulkner novel. The lanky mechanic of the homespun variety would then work out the bugs of his latest engine. His company couldn't build the engines fast enough for his motorcycles, and now he had just discovered that there was another customer base that needed his lightweight, powerful engines—dirigible pilots.

Take Captain Thomas S. Baldwin, who was the perfect example of how one thing leads to another. Glenn would tell this story many times because it helped show that if you did a good job, then one thing did lead to something else. Baldwin was at his California ranch, trying to get his dirigible off the ground, but the engine kept quitting. The cowhands were having a field day. The lawnmower engine was underpowered and, worse, it would sputter out every time he tried to lift off. And then came the mythical part. Just as he was about to give up, a dust cloud appeared on the road and was coming closer and closer. It turned into a tornado, with a bug-eyed man in front, gunning down the road on a Curtiss motorcycle. “It's Harry White,” a bystander drawled, “on his newfangled motorcycle he just got from the East.”³

Like a character out of an old Saturday Evening Post story, Harry swung off, and Captain Baldwin had a close look at the puttering engine. Then Harry produced a dog-eared catalog for G. H. Curtiss Manufacturing Company in Hammondsport, New York. Baldwin thumbed through the catalog of Curtiss motorcycles and engines and hollered out, “Boys, dump the gas out of the bag and chuck that old junk pile of a motor…. I've found the motor we need.”⁴

The telegram that came into Glenn Curtiss's office wanted a two-cycled motorcycle engine shipped as soon as possible. Curtiss never had enough engines, so he ripped one out of a motorcycle and sent it off to Captain Baldwin. The motor reached Baldwin, and he promptly “installed the engine toward the rear of the spruce keel which was suspended, like a catwalk by cords from a net surrounding the bag of his newest hopeful dirigible.”5 As Cecil Roseberry describes the airship in Glenn Curtiss: Pioneer of Flight, “The rather shapeless non-rigid bag 52 feet long by 17 feet in diameter when inflated with hydrogen, was made of varnished Japanese silk. By means of a long shaft of steel tubing, the engine drove an 8-foot propeller mounted at the front to drag the craft through the air.” The pilot sat with a vertical rudder and guided the airship not unlike a boat. “The California Arrow was the first successful dirigible to fly in the United States.”⁶ And it had a Glenn Curtiss engine.

It would seem natural that Glenn would follow his engines. Captain Baldwin went to Hammondsport after winning the grand prize at the St. Louis World's Fair for flying the longest and returning to the same starting point. Baldwin thought the Curtiss factory to be small and unassuming, as was the man. Glenn Curtiss was very young and dressed more like a mechanic than the owner of a motorcycle factory: “[Baldwin] found himself face to face with a disarmingly young man, reticent almost to the point of shyness, informal, working alongside his employees in shop clothes.”⁷

Baldwin was jovial and corpulent, with a loud voice and a backslapping manner. The captain was later quoted in the local paper as saying, “Navigation of the air is as practicable as navigation of the water…. The Curtiss motor is absolutely perfect.”⁸ He ordered two more motors and entered into a long-term contract for a line of California Arrows. Baldwin couldn't help but notice the pencil drawings of engines that Curtiss had sketched out on the walls. They were almost like fine etchings, but Glenn wouldn't bother with paper when showing an innovation to the workmen. Curtiss had found his niche in the construction of engines, but he didn't take the conquest of air too seriously. “I get twice as much money for my motors from those aviation cranks,” he would later boast.⁹ However, Curtiss would later find two aviation cranks who would change his life. Baldwin had found the man to power his airships and had pointed Glenn Curtiss on a collision course with the Wright brothers.

Langley didn't know of Curtiss at this point and had found Charles Manley, his senior engineering student, at Cornell University. He was just what Langley was looking for in an assistant, a “young man who is morally trustworthy with some gumption and professional training.”¹⁰ Manley would oversee the design of the new flying machine and eventually fly it. He would spend two years developing the power plant that would generate 50 horsepower to drive the aerodrome. Money was no object, and everyone expected Langley to be the man who would crack the code of being able to ascend to the heavens. People would have laughed at the suggestion that a bicycle mechanic was already further along than the great scientist who headed the Smithsonian Institute, Secretary Langley. Money, government support, and the best minds of science were required to tackle flight. Not some man in a tent in the sands of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. That was laughable.

But Octave Chanute would not have laughed as he knocked on the door of the house on Hawthorne Street. Wilbur had taken a walk and when he returned, the professorial Chanute was in his parlor. On his stroll around the neighborhood, Wilbur might have passed Oliver Crook Haugh's old home. Maybe he pushed his tongue against the bridge in his mouth and thought of that day of ice-skating that changed the course of his life. In five years, an electric chair would end Haugh's life.

Sprouting a white goatee and a cane, Chanute lit up the Wright home with his wit, insight, and, much more than all that, his knowledge of the science of aeronautics. Katherine Wright had let in the distinguished man with the snow-white hair, and Milton must have met the dapper, world-famous engineer with mixed emotions. “O. Chanute spent the evening with our boys…. Mr. O. Chanute spent most of the forenoon and till after 2:00 with us. He is an authority on aerial navigation.”11 These short entries in his diary could have been the same if another boy from the neighborhood had dropped in.

Milton was the star of the household, the fount of knowledge and morality, if not God, and here was this secular man who really was a player on the world stage. Milton liked to think his travels and his importance required and deserved the support of his grown children. But here was a man from the outside, an important man who took the lark to Kitty Hawk to fly a crazy contraption to another level. Could his son Wilbur really be onto something? This man seemed to think so.

There is very little written about this encounter but, it may be speculated, however, that Wilbur Wright took this occasion to tell Chanute of his two articles, “Angle of Incidence” and “The Horizontal Position During Flight.”¹² As the editor of The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright speculated, Chanute probably encouraged Wilbur to “publish more details of their experimental work, and especially the results of the 1901 season, then about to begin and the germ of the idea probably started here of having Wilbur Wright address the Western Society of Engineers.”¹³ This would come to pass later in the year.

The importance given to Chanute's visit by Wilbur is really shown by the Wright housekeeper Carrie Kaylor Grumbach's recollection fifty years later of an incident involving dessert. Katherine Wright had “decided on melons for dessert and gave instructions that if one melon on cutting proved to be better than the other, Carrie was to make sure Mr. Chanute got a piece of the better one.”14 Carrie saw only partially ripe melon and decided to parse it up into bite-sized portions for everyone. So, Chanute ended up with a grape-sized piece. Katherine was not happy, as she knew how much for Wilbur was riding on this visit.

Milton saw outsiders as invaders, and already others were entering their lives. The boys had hired Charlie Taylor to run their business because they were heading back to Kitty Hawk again. Milton didn't like this. People were leaving. He was leaving, and that was fine; but others should remain home to keep the hearth fires burning. He was doing God's work. He was doing important work. He was not trying to fly, which God did not intend man to do. And now they were bringing in this farm boy to run the bicycle business.

What Milton didn't know, but the Wrights recognized, was that Charlie Taylor was a crack mechanic with an intuitive sense of how things worked, and he could make up something on the spot to fix a problem. Wilbur valued this ability above all else. Charlie smoked cigars one after another and irritated their sister with his braggadocio, but he could work like hell and was fully capable of handling the business, though he and Katherine would clash.

In the history of flight, the hiring of this man—who had quit school in seventh grade, owned his own machine shop, fathered two children, and had worked at several places before doing freelance jobs for the Wrights—would be almost as important as Wilbur's first letter to the Weather Bureau. He was to the Wrights as Charles Manley was to Langley or Glenn Curtiss was to Baldwin, though they didn't know it. Charlie would eventually be put to task building a motor that could go on the Wrights’ airplane, and he would have to do it from scratch. He would not spend the thousands that would be used in the pursuit of the latest technology to power Secretary Langley's machine. He would build the machine for less than a hundred dollars.

Years later, Charlie Taylor would look back on his entry into the world of aeronautics, and it was not the story of Langley searching out the best and the brightest among the top schools that he remembered: “There were just the two of them in the shop and they said they needed another hand. They offered me 18 a week. That was pretty good money; it figured up to 30 cents an hour. I was making 25 cents at the Dayton electric company, which was about the same all skilled machinists were getting. The Wright shop was only six blocks from where I lived.”15

American ingenuity and resourcefulness seemed to be rich commodities in the early years of the century. Ford, Edison, Westinghouse, and Wright, but now Wilbur had Octave Chanute sitting at his kitchen table at 7 Hawthorne Street. It was June 26, 1900, and Milton, Wilbur, Orville, and Katherine were eating lunch. Chanute was impressed with the two young men in front of him. There are no records of the conversation, but Chanute's view that flying would be solved by a team of men came through. He believed young, enthusiastic men who were bright and innovative could collectively solve the riddle of flight. He did not believe a lone individual like Wilbur could do it on his own.

It was during his two-day visit that he told them about Edward Chambers Huffaker. A devotee of Langley's, he had worked for the Smithsonian before feeling that he had to go out on his own. Huffaker was no slouch; as Tom Crouch cited in The Bishop's Boys, he was “one of the most experienced and best educated aeronautical engineers in the United States.”¹⁶ He continued, “Huffaker was a graduate of Emory and Henry College and held an MS in physics from the University of Virginia.” The total of degrees between Huffaker and Chanute was easily four or five. The Wrights had not even graduated high school, and yet Chanute had latched onto Wilbur's letters and was now sitting in his home. What had he seen in the short correspondence that led him to bother with a man who could be another crank trying to ascend to the sky?

Huffaker was building Chanute a glider, and the Frenchman wanted him to bring it to Kitty Hawk to join the Wrights. It is amazing that Wilbur did not reject this out of hand, and it shows that he was very careful not to antagonize Octave Chanute. What was coming together at the table in Dayton was the hub of a wheel, and on each spoke were men working toward a common goal. Wilbur needed to be on that wheel to get the cross-pollination he required. Another man working with Chanute was George Alexander Spratt, who had written to Chanute and professed his desire to fly. He was a young physician with absolutely no experience in gliders, but Chanute saw something in him.

Chanute believed in his intuition regarding the men who would solve the problem of flight. He felt that Wilbur Wright was onto something, and Huffaker, through his guidance, might produce a flyable airplane. Who knows, even Spratt might hold the magic key. Wilbur took all of this in and did not say no to either man coming to Kitty Hawk. Chanute was a bit like a gambler betting on a lot of different horses but not sure which one could really cross the line. The Huffaker glider did not work out; Chanute recognized the faulty design and suggested that Wilbur fly it at Kitty Hawk as a kite. He offered to send Spratt and Huffaker to assist the Wrights in flying the glider.

Wilbur Wright did not need assistance, but he did need Chanute. And so, he managed a diplomatic letter after Chanute had left. “As to Mr. Huffakers [sic] trip to Kitty Hawk I do not feel competent to advise you…. If however, you wish to get a line on his capacity and attitude and give him a little experience with a view to utilizing him in your own work later, we will be very glad to have him with us.”17

In other words, Spratt and Huffaker could come if this would ensure the relationship with Chanute, which Wilbur desperately needed. The truth was that Wilbur had latched onto a group of men who were in the forefront of aeronautics. He would surpass them all, but on the eve of the second trip to Kitty Hawk he needed to be in the loop before he left them all behind. In a letter to Octave, he explored the idea that someone coming to their camp might appropriate their ideas if not their technology. This was after Chanute assured him that the men would be discreet. Wilbur immediately wrote back that “we [he and Orville] do not think the class of people interested in aeronautics would naturally be of a character to act unfairly…. The labors of others have been of a great benefit to us in obtaining an understanding of the subject and have been suggestive and stimulating. We would be pleased if our labors should be of similar benefit to others.”¹⁸

This is just a glimmer of what would later become a full-blown obsession with keeping their invention secret. Wilbur was willing to risk someone taking his ideas on wing warping or the position of the pilot or the angle of incidence if it meant keeping the door open. His mind was still hungry for what others knew in a field that was entirely new. At this point, the relationship between Wilbur and Chanute bordered on teacher/mentor/student. Lilienthal, Spratt, Huffaker, Chanute, and even Langley and Charlie Taylor all were faculty at the university of Wilbur Wright with its one student. This would change after the third trip to Kitty Hawk, but for now the letters would flow between them even more furiously. The school of one was in full session and would convene in the sands of Kitty Hawk.