Wilbur was eager to get back to Kitty Hawk. “Owing to changes in our business arrangements we shall start on our trip much earlier than we had expected, probably not later than July 10th,” he wrote to Octave Chanute, who planned to join them.1 He wanted to get back on the hot sand. The dragonflies crackled in the weeds along with the smell of dead fish and sand crabs skittered by, then disappeared into holes. The ocean rose and fell. Here was the edge of the country, and beyond the ocean was Europe. In 1901, there was just the sand, the ocean, the silence, the heat, and the rain.

Chanute quickly wrote back promising to bring the anemometer Wilbur had requested. The Wrights left for Kitty Hawk on July 7, 1901. They arrived in Elizabeth City in the middle of a hurricane with 93 mph winds. “We reached Kitty Hawk several days later than we expected owing to the greatest storm in the history of the place,” Wilbur wrote Chanute.² Octave Chanute, Edward Huffaker, and George Spratt were to join them at their camp. Their camp would be not in Kitty Hawk but in Kill Devil Hills, where Wilbur had flown the year before. “The practice ground at the Kill Devil Hills consists of a level plain of bare sand from which rises a group of detached hills…. The three which we use for gliding experiments are known as the Big Hill, the Little Hill and the West Hill,” Wilbur would write later.³

Four miles from Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills was where Wilbur would crack the code of manned flight in 1903, but “Kitty Hawk” rolled off the tongue easier, and it stuck. The memorial to flight is in Kill Devil Hills and not Kitty Hawk. This is one of many misnomers regarding the Wright brothers. But they had to get there still. For two days they waited out the storm and then started across the sound, but not before Wilbur wired instructions to the three men who were to join them: “Leave Norfolk at 10 AM Monday, Wed or Saturday arriving at Nags Head the same day…. Nags Head is eight miles South of Kill Devil Hills where we camp. If notified in time we can meet you at Nags Head if weather is favorable, otherwise you can get conveyance there. Our freight arrived in Elizabeth City this morning and will go down to Kitty Hawk with us.”4

The Wrights spent the first night at the Tates’, then loaded all their lumber and equipment into a beach cart and began the long, wet trek to Kill Devil Hills. The rain was incessant and lasted for seven days. They could do little but wait. They were two men in wool pants, vests, high-collar shirts, and hard shoes. There were no tennis shoes or shorts or t-shirts or floppy hats. They were cut off from civilization and could only wait out the rain in their tent. Orville later wrote to his sister:

After fooling around all day inside the tent, excepting on a few occasions when we rushed out to drive a few more tent pegs our thirst became unbearable, and we decided upon driving the Webbert pump, no well where we could get water being within a mile! Well we got no well, the point came loose down in the sand and we lost it! Oh misery! Most dead for water and none within a mile excepting what was coming from the skies. However, we decided to catch a little of this and placed the dish pan where the water dripped down from the tent roof; and though it tastes somewhat of the soap we had rubbed on the canvas to keep it from mildewing, it pretty well filled a long felt want.⁵

Finally, they could begin work on their hangar on Monday, July 15. Work proceeded for three days: “The building is a grand institution with awnings at both ends; that is, with big doors hinged at the top, which we swing open and prop up, making an awning the full length of the building at each end…. We keep both ends open almost all the time and let the breezes have full sway.”⁶ And then Edward Huffaker arrived. They watched the heavily bearded man huff across the sand dunes like a lonesome traveler cross the Sierra. Huffaker immediately took shelter in their tent, not offering to lend a hand on the construction of the shed. The author of the pamphlet On Soaring Flight had been a protégé of Langley at the Smithsonian.⁷ His epiphanic moment was when he took strands of Chinese silk and waved it in to the wind to prove that “birds soared on currents of rising sun-heated air.”⁸

After this high point, Huffaker was a man who spat tobacco juice in a spittoon with his feet on his desk while reading documents. When he came to work for Chanute, Langley had given him high praise but was probably glad to be rid of the chewing, spitting scientist. But Huffaker did write in his diary to record his observations upon arrival: “The Wrights reached here about the 10th of July and proceeded to erect a tent and workshop. The latter is 16 × 25 in horizontal dimensions and 6 1/2 feet in height, with low pitched roof, covered with tar paper. The ends are closed with falling doors, hinged on a level with the eaves, and both can be closed and opened at will…. In this building the machine is to be put together and housed in bad weather.”9

While the Wrights finished up their hangar, Huffaker gave them lectures on morality while using their box camera for a stool. Wilbur detested the man but said little, later writing, “He is intelligent and has good ideas but little execution. His machine, which he built at Mr. Chanute's expense, is a total failure mechanically.”¹⁰

Huffaker worked on Chanute's glider and complained about the weather in his diary: “The weather has been so warm that work in the afternoon has been out of the question.”¹¹ With Huffaker came a black plague swarming down from the skies. They had just finished the hangar, and the construction of the glider was next, but the sun was suddenly blotted out by a mighty swarm of mosquitoes fueled by the recent rains. In the Outer Banks, the mosquitoes were only supposed to strike en masse once every ten years. This time they came in 1901. Orville would later say it was the worst experience of his life, and that included fighting off typhoid fever:

The agonies of typhoid fever with its attending starvation are as nothing in comparison. But there was no escape. The sand and grass and trees and hills and everything were crawling with them. They chewed us clean through our underwear and socks. Lumps began swelling up all over my body like hens’ eggs. We attempted to escape by going to bed, which we did at a little after five o'clock. We put our cots under the awnings and wrapped up in our blankets with only our noses protruding…. The wind which until now has been blowing over twenty miles an hour, dropped off entirely. Our blankets then became unbearable. The perspiration would roll off us in torrents.¹²

The three men then set up their cots beneath mosquito netting out in the open. “We put our cots out on the sand twenty or thirty feet from the tent and the house and crawled in under the netting and bedclothes, Glen Osborne fashion, and lay there on our backs smiling at the way we got the best of them. The tops of the canopies were covered with mosquitoes,” Orville later described to Katherine, “until there was hardly standing room for another one, the buzzing was like the buzzing of a mighty buzz saw. But what was our astonishment when in a few minutes we heard a terrific slap and a cry from Mr. Huffaker announcing that the enemy had gained the outer works.”13

They abandoned their cots and “fled from them, rushing all about the sand for several hundred feet around trying to find some place of safety.”¹⁴ The men then tried to find refuge again and were forced back to their wool blankets. They considered that they might have to abandon camp until they began to burn old stumps to drive the mosquitoes away. “We proceeded to build big fires about camp, dragging in old tree stumps which are scattered out over the sands at about a quarter mile from the camp, and keeping up such smoke that the enemy could not find us.”¹⁵

During this siege, Chanute's second protégé, George Spratt, arrived. Not able to handle the smoke the other men were sleeping in, he set his cot out in the open air: “Mr. Spratt after getting in bed with the smoke blowing over him before long announced that he could no longer stand the fire and dragged his cot out in the clean air. A few minutes later he returned, saying the mosquitoes were worse than the smoke.”¹⁶

Spratt, while much more amenable to the Wrights, had no real credentials other than a desire to fly. He turned out to be a hard worker who had studied the problem of flight. Chanute had billed him as a man who had a medical background, but this turned out not to be true. He was one of many men of the time who dreamed of flying but had no real methodology or science to work toward the goal. Aviation attracted drifters in 1901. It was an unreal science that promised man the ability to leave the earth, and for this there was no shortage of fabulists who glommed onto men like the Wright brothers or Octave Chanute. In this new field, the lack of structure, the roll of the dice, and the very absurdity of flight were the lights for the moths of discontent. Octave Chanute had probably taken on Spratt based on his youthful zeal, which the old man felt he needed in order to get a plane off the ground. Spratt also had a streak of melancholia that Wilbur tried to help him with since he had his own three years of depression. Even with his lack of credentials and psychological deficiencies, Spratt was much preferable to Huffaker, whom the Wrights identified as a shirker and a poser.

There were four men now living in the hangar, and Orville did a lot of the cooking. They created a gas stove out of metal barrel, “and shelves lined with canned goods, Arm and Hammer Baking Soda, Chase Sanborn Coffee, Royal Purple Hand Picked Tomatoes, Gold Dust Green Gage Plums. Fresh butter, eggs, bacon and watermelon had to be carried on foot from Kitty Hawk.”17 Huffaker made a habit of using other people's personal items and probably took more than his share of the food. He had abandoned his own plans to fly Octave Chanute's glider, which was slowly being covered with sand. Still, he was no help at doing dishes or pitching in on the general duties of camp. It is a testament to Wilbur Wright's respect for Octave Chanute and his desire to keep that relationship steady that he allowed someone like Huffaker to camp with them in the wilds of the Outer Banks.

Between dissertations on character building, the slovenly Huffaker dimly realized that he was out of his league. He saw how far Wilbur Wright had come, and he was ready to watch history in the making. On July 27, the glider was ready and the day was clear. Wilbur stood in the cradle on the glider, breathing the heat just below. Sand stung his eyes and peppered his cheeks. He faced the edge of the Big Hill, with Orville holding one wing and Spratt holding the other. Huffaker, William Tate, and Tate's half brother, Dan, were there to help. The wind was blowing at 25 miles per hour, with the ocean blue in the distance. The beach road beyond the dunes was a long, slim gray line, and the cloudless sky was a stunning cerulean expanse. It was a perfect day to fly.

The men began to run with Wilbur. He was heading toward the cliff of the dune and felt the lift pushing up under his arms. He reached the edge of the Big Hill and felt the glider lift him off the ground. Wilbur pulled himself up and lay down inside the wing. The wind whistled through the wired struts as the rising air floated the glider up toward the sky. Wilbur moved his hips and took the handles as the sand dunes became small and suddenly the ocean appeared. It was just the wind now. Silence for a few seconds. Flying now. Wilbur moved the elevator when the glider nosed down, and he rushed toward the yellow, glaring plane as the sand rose up to meet him.

Wilbur bashed his nose on the elevator and felt the wind go out of his lungs. He could have been killed if he had gone higher. The glider had nosed down into the sand after a few yards. The elevator was not working the way it should. “The operator having taken a position where the center of gravity was supposed to be, an attempt at gliding was made,” Wilbur later wrote in his article “Experiments in Gliding.”18 “But the machine turned downward and landed after only going a few yards. This indicated the center of gravity was too far in front of the center of pressure. In the second attempt the operator took a position several inches further back but the result was much the same.”¹⁹

Wilbur kept moving back on the wing, not unlike a man on a teeter-totter, trying to compensate for the glider's continued nosing toward the ground. Finally, he was almost on the very back of the wing when “the machine sailed off and made an undulating flight of little more than 300 feet. To the onlookers this flight seemed very successful but to the operator it was known that the full power of the rudder [elevator] had been required to keep the machine from running into the ground.”²⁰ As Wilbur would later write to Chanute, “In the 1900 machine one fourth as much elevator has been sufficient to give much better control. It was apparent that something was radically wrong.”

Huffaker later recorded in his diary the flights made on that day in August:

A number of excellent glides were made, Mr. Wilbur Wright showing good control of the machine in the winds as high as 25 miles an hour. In two instances he made flights curving sharply to the left, still keeping the machine under good control—length of flight in each case 280 feet. Longest flight 335…. On the occasion of the last flight made while skimming along about a foot above the ground, the left wing became depressed and in shifting his body to right to bring it up again he neglected the fore and aft control and plunged suddenly into the ground. He was thrown forward into the elevator, breaking a number of the rudders ribs and bruising his eye and nose.²¹

Wilbur had decided it was all his fault. And once the glider fell backward to the ground. “Screams from the ground sent the pilot scooting rapidly forward toward the leading edge. To everyone's relief, the glider pancaked straight down from an altitude of twenty feet, landing without injury to pilot or machine.”²² Each time, Wilbur had a sinking feeling of loss of control and a panicky thought that he might be in danger. The sands of the Outer Banks saved his life more than once that day. Nothing was working the way it should. “In one glide the machine rose higher and higher till it lost all its headway. This was the position from which Lilienthal had always found difficult to extricate himself,” Wilbur later wrote.23

These stalls were the death zone in 1901 and are still a pilot's nightmare. Lift ceases and the plane falls like a stone. Even large, modern airliners, with all their electronic equipment to detect stall conditions, have stalled. The nose goes high, and the airflow across the wings ceases. For the first time, there was real fear that Wilbur might kill himself. The front elevator took the brunt of the nose dives and possibly saved his life, but the 1901 glider was much less controllable than the 1900 glider. And it was much more dangerous. Huffaker was clueless and wrote later that a glide by Wilbur of 315 feet was the best he had ever seen. Wilbur knew something was terribly wrong. The lift coefficients were all wrong. “The adjustments of the machine were way off,” Orville explained in a letter.²⁴ Essentially, the curve of the wing—the camber or lift—was wrong. As the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum explains it, “a key term in the lift and drag equations was Smeaton's coefficient, which accounted for the density of air. A value for the coefficient of 0.005 had been widely used since the 18th century. Using measurements obtained from their glider tests at Kitty Hawk and the lift equation, the Wright brothers calculated a new average value of 0.0033. Modern aerodynamicists have confirmed this figure to be accurate within a few percent.”²⁵ Essentially they had adopted Lilienthal's equations, but Wilbur began to suspect the numbers were wrong.

Wilbur went back to the drawing board and reshaped the wings in the shed. Author Tom Crouch wrote of this period, “As in 1900 they decided to pause and gather a full range of data while flying the glider as an unmanned kite before risking any further damage to craft or pilot.”²⁶ Wilbur then took off again, with much better results. He wrote later of his glides, “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.”²⁷

Huffaker speculated that history would soon be made. Wilbur wrote to his father that there was much more work to be done: “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 those difficulties…are overcome, while we expect to find further difficulties of a theoretic nature which must be met by mechanical designs.”28

In other words, Wilbur knew instinctively the complex problems that were presented by flying a glider under control. Huffaker and other men were thrilled to see anything resembling manned flight since their own experiments had yielded dismal results. But like the painter or the writer or the scientist who is bent on the completion of the project, Wilbur knew how far they must go: “As we had expected to devote a major portion of our time to experimenting in an 18 mile an hour wind without much motion of the machine, we find that our hopes of obtaining actual practice in the air reduced to about one fifth of what we hoped.”²⁹

Out of all the men present in Kitty Hawk in 1901, Wilbur alone was flying the gliders, and he alone was risking his very life in a field that few knew anything about. They installed a hip cradle to try out the wing warping and immediately stumbled into a fundamental problem of control. “We found [ourselves] completely nonplussed.”³⁰ When the warping was applied for a short time, the plane could be righted quickly, but when a turn was sustained, “things began to fall rapidly apart…[as] Wilbur sensed the machine was turning, skidding, really, to the wing that presented the most surface to the air.”³¹ Flying was proving to be more hazardous than he initially thought. “It was a very difficult thing to put your finger on,” he later explained. “To the person who has never attempted to control an uncontrollable flying machine in the air, this may seem somewhat strange, but the operator on the machine is so busy manipulating the rudder and looking for a soft place to alight, that his ideas of what actually happens are very hazy…a peculiar feeling of instability.”³²

Wilbur's own glider experiments had given him the suspicion that aeronautical science might all be founded on flawed data that he must correct, or quite possibly it would kill him. Necessity was the mother of invention, or at least survival. Chanute soon arrived at their camp and was impressed with Wilbur's long-sustained glides. One gets the feeling that these men, while well-schooled in the science of flying, were not sure man could fly. Certainly, Chanute thought he might not see it in his lifetime. It was as if the true reality of flying was not to be taken seriously. Progress toward the goal was acceptable, but to solve the problem of flight, well, that was still a fantastical idea.

But to see Wilbur Wright soaring over the dunes and breaking the wide blue sky and blazing white sand, with the figure of his glider and his prone body soaring toward the heavens, it must have seemed like so much magic. Wilbur was really the one who thought man could fly and control the air. It is a bit like the one person who sees success as not a hope but as a realized dream. Theory is one thing, but to see a man fly was, in 1901, still quite astounding. The men who watched Wilbur lift into the sky were stupefied that someone—who was not on a bobbing contraption or in a rocket—was flying in a controlled way that was unseen on Earth up to that moment.

The pictures of these glides are still as amazing as Wilbur had found them when he returned home to his darkroom. He would later tell the Western Society of Engineers.

In looking at this picture you will readily understand that the excitement of gliding experiments does not entirely cease with the breakup of camp. In the photographic darkrooms at home we pass moments of as thrilling interest as any in the field when the image begins to appear on the plate and it is yet an open question whether we have a picture of a flying machine or merely a patch of open sky.33

But Wilbur had detected another severe problem while careening across the sky. The wing-warping system, the gold nugget of their aeronautical discoveries, did not seem to be working at all. Another crash illustrated the problem. While skimming close to the ground, the left wing dipped unexpectedly, and Wilbur pulled hard on the elevator to get some altitude, but it was too late. The glider nosed down, and Wilbur felt himself catapulted forward like a human missile. He went crashing into the elevator, bruising his ribs, blackening his eye, and nearly breaking his nose. If it were not for the sand, the crash would have been far worse. But Wilbur was back to thinking that nothing was behaving as it should, and he had a nagging feeling that “there was a fundamental problem with the information they had inherited from Lilienthal and others.”³⁴

Still, Chanute was impressed, and he wrote in his diary on August 9, “A number of excellent glides were made, Mr. Wilbur Wright showing good control of the machine in winds as high as 25 miles an hour. In two instances he made flights curving sharply to the left, still keeping the machine under good control.”35 Clearly Chanute was impressed and left Kitty Hawk two days later feeling that Wilbur was on the right track. To Wilbur, though, he saw the “new difficulty with lateral control was even more disturbing…. The realization that there was some mysterious problem with the warping mechanism was the worst blow.”³⁶

The rain came for four days, and the Wrights felt it was time to go home. Wilbur got a cold. Spratt left, and then Huffaker—but not before helping himself to one of Wilbur's blankets: “When we came to pack up I made the unpleasant discovery that one of my blankets that had lived with me for years on terms of closest intimacy…had abandoned me for another.”³⁷ Wilbur and Orville left on August 20. Once home, Wilbur wrote Chanute of his disappointment in being able to control the glider:

We left Kitty Hawk at daybreak Tuesday morning and reached home this [Thursday] morning. It rained four days in succession after you left and then blew straight from the South till our departure…. The last week was without very great results though we proved that our machine does not turn toward the lowest wing under all circumstances, a very unlooked for result and one which completely upsets our theories as to the causes which produce the turning to right or left.³⁸

Orville would later say that Wilbur groused on the train, “man would not fly for a thousand years.”³⁹ Actually, he said fifty years. Either Fred Kelly changed it or Orville exaggerated.⁴⁰ So why would Wilbur say such a thing, and what was it he saw that his brother and others did not? The answer is he alone was flying. He alone knew how far he had come and how far he had to go. He was risking his life, and what he felt up in the air was the total lack of control, which had to send shivers down his spine. Flying without control was not flying: “That was the heart of the control problem; How to govern the movement of pressure around the center of gravity.”⁴¹

In gliding, the two points came together when flying straight: “The elevator and wing-warping controls enabled the pilot to alter the position of the center of pressure.”⁴² In other words, one must control the air, and Wilbur seemed to be the only one who knew how far they had to go. Others assumed flight was like a train running down a track that was fundamentally stable. Wilbur believed that flight was unstable and had to controlled. He had come to believe that they had to start over and throw out all previous assumptions about flying. The mistake on the camber line (the curve of the wing) had led him to believe that Lilienthal's death, while unlucky, was also the result of a “problem with the information they had inherited from Lilienthal” himself.43 The German simply did not understand the next step in controlled flight, and he had paid the ultimate price. Wilbur felt that men who flew without science were truly suicidal. Like the engineer, he had to understand the physics of controlled flight before actually flying.

Once home, the Wright brothers settled back into a routine. Katherine wrote her father, who was again on the road, “The boys walked in unexpectedly on Thursday morning. They haven't had much to say about flying. They can only talk about how disagreeable Mr. Huffaker was. Mr. Chanute was there for a week. Will is sick with a cold or he would have written to you before this.”⁴⁴

The sister was covering for the brother to keep her father happy. Wilbur didn't write, and he didn't talk about flying. There was nothing to say. He had left Orville long ago in the science of flying, and now he would leave even Chanute. But Chanute would prove invaluable still by funneling all known information to Wilbur, including secretive information from Samuel Langley: “Since beginning this letter I have received one from Prof. Langley in answer to one of mine some weeks ago. I enclose it herewith and beg that you will return it when you have absorbed his data for a surface very similar to yours. It is as he says confidential, i.e., the data are not to be published.”⁴⁵

Chanute was a sort of clearinghouse for Wilbur, who would return the Langley letter and say that his data differed, but one must imagine the sheer volume of information passed on by Chanute that made its way into Wilbur's final calculations. And yet Wilbur was down. A decade later, he recalled his feelings at the end of the 1901 experiments in Kitty Hawk: “Although we had broken the record for distance in gliding, and although Mr. Chanute who was present at the time, assured us that our results were better than had ever before been attained, yet when we looked at the time and money which we had expended, and considered the progress made and the distance yet to go, we considered our experiments a failure. At this time, I made the prediction that men would sometime fly, but that it would not be within our lifetime.”⁴⁶

Wilbur felt in his mind that he simply had to start over. He would have to finally break the tether of Chanute, Langley, Lilienthal, and others, and leap into the unknown to find his own answers.