Chanute waited outside the large office. The august building smelled of old wood and the dust of time. Here men of science had plied their craft and set their names down in the annals of history. Octave tapped his foot and felt some grit down in his socks. The sand of Kitty Hawk was everywhere. It was in his luggage, in his glass case, on his papers, in his hair, in his shoes, on his toothbrush, in his razor, and even in his teeth. The food the Wright brothers had provided him at Kill Devil Hills was very good fare for being in a shed in the middle of nowhere, but the sand crept into the biscuits, the water, the bacon, and the eggs. That grit crushed between his teeth, and at night he felt like he was grinding his teeth.

Now his skin was dried out, windburned, and sunburned. His beard also had sand in it, and his eyes watered incessantly. He arthritis had kicked up from sleeping on the stiff cots, and now he had a cough. But it was an amazing time. He had seen the Wright brothers glide like no men before. Wilbur did most of the glides, but then Orville had done some, too, though Octave had only seen Wilbur. There had been an accident before he arrived: “My brother after too brief practice with the use of the front rudder,” Wilbur had written him before he arrived, “tried to add the use of the wing-twisting arrangement also, with the result that, while he was correcting a slight rise in one wing, he completely forgot to attend to the front rudder, and the machine reared up and rose some twenty five feet and sidled off and struck the ground.”1

Apparently, Orville was not hurt, but this set them back days. Octave's opinion of Orville Wright was of a man who did not talk much and seemed to wait to see what his brother thought. Why risk the machine with a man who was just learning to fly? Octave shifted in his chair. He looked at his pocket watch. Langley would make him wait, of course. Chanute had come from spending a week with four men in a large hangar, and he still felt the luxury of sitting in an upholstered chair.

Spratt had been there, and another Wright brother, Lorin; and, of course, Chanute had brought Augustus Herring with him to fly his own triplane. Chanute shivered at the Smithsonian. He still felt a chill, even though Wilbur had written him beforehand: “You should bring warm clothing and not less than the equivalent of two heavy double blankets for bedding, as we may have cool nights in October. We will arrange to have the necessities of life in the way of food but as our food was selected according to our tastes, it may be that it may lack what you prefer.”2

Chanute had brought more blankets, and the six men had slept in the loft like sardines packed tightly together with their cots touching. The wind had shaken the hangar and came through the cracks in the wood. The ocean's roar seemed to be in that wind at times, and the cold scent of dead fish crept into the damp building. Chanute had awoken in the night, hearing the men snoring, and had thought it was odd that something as monumental as attempting to fly like the gods would be brought about by men sleeping in a shed on the edge of a sand dune. It was a long way from the rarified air of the Smithsonian, where he now sat, waiting for Langley. The early, bracing cold of September and then October had let Chanute know they were playing with Mother Nature, with northeasters and hurricanes possible any moment. Wilbur and Orville had taken in stride the wind that shook the shed to its foundations. That these men had spent time in a tent two years before seemed incredible to Chanute.

Chanute moved his legs and felt the pain in his hips. He would give anything to sink into a hot bath, but he wanted to see Langley first. He wanted to see him while the inspiration was still hot on him. In his mind, Wilbur Wright had solved the problem of flight. A breakthrough—the addition of a hinged rudder—had apparently occurred before Chanute had arrived. It was the problem of well digging, as the brothers called it.³ It was the tendency of the plane in a turn to descend with the leading wing pointing down. Wilbur had then connected the hinged rudder to the cradle controlling the wing warping. There were now the three axes of control between the elevator or pitch for going up or down, the wing warping or roll for banking, and the rudder controlling yaw for turning. Chanute didn't know it, but this basic mechanical setup of control would set the bar for modern aviation for the next hundred years.

Chanute's own triplane had been a total disaster, and Herring had been rather unpleasant and jealous of the tremendous glides the Wright plane was making. Many of the glides were not over 200 hundred feet long, but the plane was making perfectly executed turns. Control of the air had been wrestled from the heavens, and Wilbur's glides resembled the soaring buzzards Chanute had observed over their camp. He had only been there for a week, but it was enough time for him to understand that Wilbur Wright was close to solving the problem of manned flight in a heavier-than-air machine. You could not watch that large glider cutting the sky, with Wilbur in full control, and not think that they were peering into a new age, a new world.

The door opened. “Mr. Langley will see you now.”

Chanute popped up from his chair and walked across the marble floor. He couldn't help but feel that he was trailing sand behind him. Langley's office was so large that the Wright flyer might have fit inside it. Standing up behind the desk was Samuel Langley, a bearded sixty-eight to Chanute's seventy-two. He knew Langley was well funded and the Smithsonian was ramping up to produce the first airplane. Ever since the success of Langley's model aerodrome, he had been the undisputed leader as the man with the best chance to fly a plane under its own power.

The men shook hands, and then Chanute told him plainly what he had seen in Kitty Hawk. Langley kept his hands together under his chin and listened attentively. He gave Chanute no sign of his own progress, but that didn't surprise Octave. He was used to the paranoid secrecy of Secretary Langley and the Smithsonian. Langley listened with little visible reaction as Chanute finished.

He thanked Chanute for his time and saw him to the door. When he turned around, Langley felt a strange panic. It was like looking over your shoulder and seeing someone behind you who had seemingly come from nowhere. If what Chanute had said was true, then there was no time to lose. He would tell Manley, who was overseeing construction of Langley's own flyer, to continue with all deliberate speed. They must not be eclipsed by some bicycle mechanic. Secretary Langley sat back down behind his desk, pulled out some stationery, and picked up his pen. He immediately began writing a letter to Wilbur Wright, care of Kitty Hawk Post Office, Mr. William Tate.4