Orville was staring up from his cot. Around him the men were snoring and the wind banged against the walls of the hangar. Below the loft where they were sleeping was the glider, freshly rebuilt after his accident. He had flown. He had flown on a tether and then he had flown in free flight. That was the disaster. Thirty feet up and the plane headed for the ground when he used the wing warping. He would later write, “I thought I must have worked the twisting apparatus the wrong way…the result was a heap of flying machine, cloth, and sticks in a heap, with me in the center.”1 Death. Yes, he saw it with the plane rushing for the ground, and then he was buried in canvas and wires and sand. Wilbur told him he forgot to use the elevator when he turned and the plane had slid down to the earth sideways. Three days of repairs.

And this was the improved plane. When Wilbur flew it, the plane was amazing. He flew off like a bird and seemed to control the sky. It was bigger, with a wing surface of 32 by 5 feet, and two tail fins or rudders. Everything was built according to the data tables from the wind tunnel. The camber, or the curve of the wing, was all vastly different. It was a new plane, but there was still the problem of well digging. When the plane turned, it pivoted on the wing and dug a hole in the ground. Orville looked at Spratt and his brother. They were peacefully sleeping, but he had drunk too much coffee; he just couldn't understand the tendency of the plane to head down and slip sideways when they turned. It was vexing. The rudders should have taken care of that, but there was something they were missing. Orville tossed and turned.

Here a legend was born. The Kelly biography paints the picture this way: “Then one night Orville drank more than his customary amount of coffee. Instead of going to sleep as usual the moment he got into bed, he lay awake for several hours. Those extra cups of coffee may have been important for the future of practical flight for, as he tossed about, he figured out the explanation of the phenomenon caused by the tail.”2

The story goes that Orville awoke to an epiphanic moment. The rudder should be hinged. The story continues that his brother Lorin had come down to visit, and, while they were sitting around breakfast, Orville brought it up to Wilbur, expecting a fight: “Orville fully expected his suggestion to be brushed aside with an ‘oh yes, I was already considering that.’…Instead Wilbur listened attentively and remained silent for a moment or two.”³ Then, without hesitation, he not only accepted the change but startled Orville by proposing that they connect it to the wing warping as well. So now when the pilot shifted his hips to turn the plane, the rudders moved in tandem. The three axes of control had just been achieved, and this would be the plane handed down to history.

In this story, Orville comes to the forefront as the man who made the breakthrough while Wilbur agreed and connected it to the other controls. Lorin is there to hand the baton to Orville as well, and the story seems to be traced back to Lorin with Orville's surprise at Wilbur's acquiescence. The problem with this is that none of it seems to be true. The true sequence of events will be made clear in a patent speech Wilbur will soon make. But what is true now is that they had arrived at Kitty Hawk on August 28 and made improvements to the shed while getting the new glider ready. They slept in beds up in the rafters now, and the kitchen had been well stocked and improved. They sunk a deeper well, filled in the cracks of the building, and built a bicycle that could run over sand and enabled them to go to Kitty Hawk to get supplies. So now it took them only one hour to get there and back, instead of three. The locals had accepted the brothers, and Kitty Hawker John T. Daniels summed up the locals’ observation of their inventiveness this way: “They built their own camp, they took an old carbide can and made a stove of it, they took a bicycle and geared the thing so it could ride on sand.”⁴

For the next week, they worked on the new glider, and on September 19 they flew it as a kite, then took it to Kill Devil Hills, where they flew fifty times in three days. Brother Lorin came to the camp. And they were expecting Chanute and Herring and Spratt. Here is where it would get interesting. For the first time, Orville began to glide. But there is some question as to how far he was gliding. In his diary, Orville said he made several short glides to learn the new method of working the front rudder. We know he did have a free glide that ended up in a crash. Was Wilbur yelling at him when he went down in a heap from thirty feet high? Did he let him fly again? The pictures of the 1902 glider flights are all of Wilbur, with only one of Orville. Would Wilbur have shut him down to keep him safe, and then covered it all with his father's admonishment that we are all one against the world?

Orville's account of the crash shows that he was in serious trouble:

I was sailing along smoothly without any trouble at all from the fore and aft control when I noticed that one wing was getting a little too high and that the machine was slowly sliding off in the opposite direction. I thought that by moving the end control mechanism an inch or so I would bring the wing back again to its proper position…By this time I found suddenly that I was making a descent backwards toward the low wing from a height of 25 or 30 feet…. The result was a heap of flying machine, cloth, and sticks in a heap, with me in the center without a bruise or scratch.5

This began three days of repairs, with Spratt and brother Lorin arriving in camp, and this sets up the whole hinged-rudder scene, complete with a wink to brother Lorin before Orville launched into his polemic. But immediately there are contradictions to this, beginning with Wilbur and the source of Orville's recollection. As Fred Howard wrote in Wilbur and Orville: A Biography of the Wright Brothers, “Wilbur's version appears in the deposition he made in a patent suit in 1912 and attributes the discovery of the cause of the well digging phenomenon to both brothers. The solution is not arrived in a single sleepless night but in the course of several days, during which they experimented to make sure that the fixed vertical tail was the cause of the difficulty.”⁶

It gets even stickier when the source of Orville's story is none other than the authorized Kelly biography, which was written almost forty years on and which was heavily edited by Orville himself. The transcript of Wilbur's deposition then ends up in the Kelly biography as quoted by Orville. The patent deposition is all Wilbur, and he adopts the plural, spreading the credit to Orville as well. First Wilbur gives an explanation of well digging: “When the wings were warped to recover balance with the low wing having a greater angle of incidence than the upper wing, a still greater drag was produced upon the low wing with a result that its speed was further decreased…. These flights ended with a disaster to the machine in what is today called a tail spin.”7

Then he explains the solution:

Our first change in the machine…was to remove one of the vertical vanes in the rear of the machine…. We found that this only slightly mitigated the evil influence of vanes. After a good deal of thought the idea occurred to us that by making the vane in the rear adjustable, so that it could be turned so as to entirely relieve the pressure on that side toward the low side of the machine, and to create a pressure on the side toward the high wing equal to or greater than the differences in the high and low wings…While this change to make the vane adjustable was being made the idea came to us of connecting the wires which operated the rudder to the cables which operated the wing warping, so that when the wings were warped the rudder was simultaneously adjusted.⁸

This did solve the problem of well digging and was an important breakthrough, so important, in fact, that Orville paraphrased it in Kelly's biography as his own discovery in a caffeine-induced high. Then Kelly paints a scene in which Wilbur listens and then “promptly saw that the explanation was probably correct and nodded approvingly.”⁹ Then in the Kelly biography there is paraphrasing of Wilbur's deposition and explanation for connecting it to the wing warping. All of this was given to Kelly almost forty years after the fact by Orville, whose brother Wilbur had died three decades before. There is the hand of the writer here as well. A good biography needs a hook, and the epiphany by Orville clearly takes him out of the role of mechanic and helper to his brother who is doing all the flying and heavy calculating required to produce a plane that will fly, and puts him squarely in the role of collaborator. Of equal.

The truth is that Wilbur has nothing to gain by lying in the deposition. Up until 1902, he was the man grappling with the problems of flight, a mission he started on his own. He had no biographer to satisfy, and he did not suffer from others suspecting that he might not be the man who was doing the problem solving and moving closer to the moment of powered flight. This could not be said for Orville, who moved in his brother's shadow at home and out in public. Wilbur only told the truth in his deposition in 1912 as he saw it. Sadly, it would be his last public statement on what happened at Kitty Hawk in 1902.

Wilbur wrote to Octave Chanute on his return:

We left Kitty Hawk at daybreak on last Tuesday and reached home at 3 PM on Friday after a very exciting but tiresome trip…. Into the last ten days of practice we crowded more glides than in all the weeks preceding. In two days we made about two hundred and fifty…. This practice enabled us to very greatly increase our skill in the management of the machine…. We received a letter from Mr. Langley a few days before we finished our experiments at Kitty Hawk, a telegram and afterwards a letter inquiring whether there would be time for him to reach us and witness some of our trials before we left. We replied that it would scarcely be possible as we were intending to break camp in a few days. He made no mention of his experiments on the Potomac.10

The fact that the secretary of the Smithsonian was willing to trudge down to the Outer Banks of North Carolina to watch a couple of bicycle mechanics experimenting with their glider shows that from a very early stage Secretary Langley was aware of their progress. They had stayed at Kitty Hawk for two months and completed a thousand glides. Men like Spratt, Herring, and Chanute were astounded. The pictures of Wilbur gliding tell the tale, with his flyer making graceful turns against the barren sand. It was obvious that all he needed was something to power the plane. The brothers left their camp on October 28 in a chilly rain and walked the four miles to Kitty Hawk. Wilbur walked with his hands in his pockets, listening to the squish of his hard shoes. All he could think about now was building an engine to power the plane he had built.