The room was hazy, with cigar smoke rising into the lantern lights. Wilbur Wright stood in front of the crowd and spoke clearly. Gone was the timid man explaining his early experiments in the sands of the Outer Banks. He was not nervous anymore. He stood in front of the crowd of engineers in the Monadnock Building and told them the story of Kitty Hawk. He told them about the birds he had studied, and the art of soaring. He told them that people were far too concerned with the machinery of flying than with the science of actual flying: “The prime object in these experiments was to obtain practice in the management of a man carrying machine, but an object of scarcely less importance was to obtain data for the study of the scientific problems involved in flight.”1 What was needed was skill. The skill to be able to control a flying machine and understanding the air the way birds do, because only then could men soar like birds. A thousand glides, he said, were equivalent to about four hours of flying, and so there was “far too little to give anyone a complete mastery of the art of flying.”²

The word art slipped by the audience, who listened to his descriptions like later people would watch men walking on the moon. This man had flown, it would seem. What he didn't tell the people was that for the last six months, a man named Charlie Taylor, an uneducated man without a high-school degree, had designed an aluminum block four-cylinder engine that could be mounted on an airplane wing. This was after Wilbur had written to manufacturers of engines about his needs and they all responded by saying that their engines would be too heavy.

So, like everything else, he would have to make it up. Wilbur then asked Charlie Taylor, the mechanic who had been running his business and driving his sister crazy, if he could design a motor. Yes, he said. Had he ever designed one before? No, he said, but that didn't matter. Later he would be widely quoted as the homespun mechanic who did the impossible: “Those two sure knew their physics. I guess that's why they always knew what they were doing and hardly ever guessed at anything…. While the boys were handy with tools, they had never done much machine work and anyway they were busy on the air frame…. We didn't make any drawings. One of us would sketch out the part we were talking about on a piece of scratch paper and I'd spike the sketch over my bench.”3

The engineers might have been interested in this pioneering work in the field of airplane engines. The use of an aluminum block sent on by the Aluminum Company of America, based in Pittsburgh, was to keep the weight below two hundred pounds and deliver 8 horsepower. The man with the bushy mustache used the same metal lathe and drill press in the back of the shop to bore out the cylinders and create the iron-cylinder rings. They would have been interested in the gravity-fed fuel system, the lack of a carburetor, and no spark plugs but a “make and break” contact system. The audience would have been interested to know if the engine ran at all and how it cracked the aluminum block, and how they had to send for another one, but this one worked just fine and delivered 12 horsepower instead of 8. The engine was started by priming the cylinders with gas, and the ignition switch was bought at a hardware store.

This was at a time when ingenuity was prized because it was necessary. There were no paths to follow. There was no corporate state to plug into. People had to make it up as they went, and building an engine no one else had ever built before went with building a plane no one else had ever built before. It was a way of looking at the world that is largely the purview of entrepreneurs now, but in 1903 it was the dominant thinking. Risk was not risk but a way of living. There were no road maps, and people like Wilbur Wright and Charlie Taylor had more in common with the pioneers than with the people sitting in the room.

But Wilbur kept that to himself, as he did the particulars of his control system with the breakthrough of connecting the hinged rudder to the wing warping and the vertical control of the elevator. Instead, he talked about soaring and Orville's accident:

On this day my brother Orville did most of the gliding…. He started on a flight with one [wing] higher than the other. This caused the machine to veer to the left. He waited a moment to see if the machine would right itself but finding that it did not then decided to apply the control. At the very instant he did this the right wing rose up unexpectedly and led him to think that possibly he made a mistake…. The machine turned up more and more until it assumed a most dangerous attitude…. From the height of nearly thirty feet the machine sailed backward till it struck the ground…. How he escaped injury I do not know.4

The engineers and their wives sitting in the semidarkness with the lantern slides in front of them were enthralled. The pictures of Wilbur soaring across the wide, desolate dunes were not unlike Teddy Roosevelt's speeches in which he described his life in the Badlands in the 1880s. The man in front of them was a pioneer; this they knew. And he was out there tweaking death with his calm demeanor. Wilbur Wright was the man giving the speech, talking about flying as if it were an everyday occurrence: “While the high flights were more spectacular the low ones were fully as valuable for training purposes. Skill comes by the constant repetition of familiar feats rather than by a few overbold attempts for which the performer is yet poorly prepared.”⁵

Overbold attempts. He spoke of flying the way a man would of being careful in his bathroom. Then he spoke of the breakthrough with the movable rudder. This was a speech, and speeches rely on quips and anecdotes and colorful stories. What better story to tell than that of his brother laced up with coffee and coming down in the morning to tell of his epiphanic moment in the dead of night? But this did not come out in the darkened room with the flickering lanterns.

Wilbur continued,

The lateral control still remained somewhat unsatisfactory. The tail was useful at times and at others was seriously in the way. It was finally concluded that the best way of overcoming the difficulty was by making the tail movable like a rudder. As originally built the fixed vertical tail or rudder was double but in changing to a movable rudder it was made single…. With this improvement our serious troubles ended.⁶

There was no mention of the breakfast conversation, nor of Wilbur's idea to attach the rudder to the hip cradle and conversely the wing-warping controls. This was omitted on purpose, as Wilbur had just been turned down for a patent on his plane, and that bit of information would allow someone to steal their plane intact. But if there was ever a place for the clever anecdote related thirty years later to Fred Kelly, this would have been the place. It would reveal nothing more than what had already been told, so the cause for omission was not proprietary information that needed to be kept secret. And Wilbur was not the type of man to ever take credit away from Orville. He was, in fact, the opposite, using the plural we or my brother and I at all times and especially in public. Big brother protecting little brother. In this sense, it is clear that Wilbur would only omit the story of Orville's coffee-fired epiphanic moment if it did not happen. He had no sense of competition with his brother regarding aviation, because he knew it was his vision they were fulfilling. So, undoubtedly, he would have thrown a bone to Orville if the movable rudder had been his idea. It is interesting to note that the only time Wilbur mentioned Orville to the audience was to describe the glider crash, a moment when things went terribly wrong.

Wilbur did omit the work his brother and he had been doing on propellers for the last six months. Here, too, they had to make it up as they went. As Orville would later write, “It is hard to find a point from which to make a start; for nothing about a propeller or the medium in which it acts, stands still for a moment. The thrust depends upon the speed and the angle at which the blade strikes the air, the angle at which the blade strikes the air depends on the speed at which the propeller is turning, the speed of the machine traveling forward, and the speed at which the air is slipping backward.”7

Basically, all they had to go on was boats. Propellers were used to push boats through the water, and this gave Wilbur a starting point at least. Variables upon variables. It was decided that an “aeronautical propeller is essentially a wing rotating in the vertical plane.”⁸ Charlie Taylor cited many arguments between the Wright brothers on the propellers. Finally, they agreed on two propellers for the Flyer, one turning clockwise and one counterclockwise, so one would balance the other in thrust. Each had a diameter of 8.5 feet, and they were constructed of spruce laminations glued tougher and then shaped with a drawknife. The Flyer would slide along on skids, and the pilot would lie prone on the lower wing with the motor, radiator, and propellers behind him. Drive chains that were used for automobiles from the Indianapolis Chain and Stamping Company would power the propellers. This was the new Flyer, and Wilbur mentioned none of this during his speech. He already had the sense that Langley and others were racing to beat him as the first man to fly under power in the air.

What Wilbur did mention was probably the first account of wind shear, which is characterized by wind that moves at a much different speed over a short distance, either horizontally or vertically. The wind shear that has caused airliners to crash at airports is generally a strong down draft or vertical wind. Wilbur's experience with wind shear began with a strange tapping, with no apparent source, that had occurred during several flights. He explained:

Some weeks later I was making a glide, the same peculiar tapping began again in the midst of a wind gust. It felt like little waves striking the bottom of a flat bottom boat. While I was wondering what it could be the machine suddenly but without any noticeable change in its inclination to the horizon dropped a distance of ten feet and in the twinkling of an eye I was flat on the ground. I am certain the gust went out with a downward trend which struck the surfaces on the upper side. The descent was at first more rapid than due to gravity, for my body apparently rose off the machine till only my hands and feet touched it.9

Neither Wilbur nor anyone in the audience understood what had happened, but it sounded very similar to a sudden downward draft or wind shear. If Wilbur had been higher, he might well have been killed.

In the following question and answer session, Wilbur was asked what he thought of Professor Langley's experiments. Wilbur ducked and responded by saying, “It is very bad policy to ask one flying machine man about the experiments of another, because every flying machine man thinks that his method is the correct one.”¹⁰ Wilbur then backed away from a question about engines and screws or propellers, the very two areas he had spent the last six months studying before creating an engine and a propeller. He said, “As none of our experiments have been with power machines, my judgement of the relative merits of screws and wings may be of little value.”¹¹

A lie, but a self-serving one in the current circumstances. Secretary Langley would be very interested in anything Wilbur Wright had to say. In less than two months, he would launch his vaunted fifty-thousand-dollar aerodrome on the Potomac. He had already tried to go to the Wright camp at Kitty Hawk and had failed after Chanute alerted him to their progress. Essentially, Wilbur Wright had left out of his speech the latest advances he had made in building an airplane that would fly under its own power. He had done this because he knew he was very close to solving human flight and did not want to tip his hand. His hard-found secrets were his, and not for someone to take and beat him to the punch. As any good writer knows, what the author leaves out is just as important as what he puts in. Wilbur had told the audience just enough to whet their appetite for more. He was learning the fine art of public relations. He left Chicago as the man closest to finding the secrets to human flight. Wilbur Wright had just told the world of his progress, and the people in Chicago again would have been hard-pressed to even know the name of his brother Orville. Wilbur rode the train home to Ohio and had no idea that Samuel Pierpont Langley was about to launch his aerodrome and set off a forty-year feud.