The Wrights had now reached a point where they felt that they were ready
to apply motive power, rise like a bird from the earth and direct their
course through the air. A new machine was built with two planes, each
six feet six inches wide and measuring forty feet from tip to tip. The
planes were arranged one directly above the other with an intervening
space of six feet. An elevating rudder of two horizontal planes ten feet
in front of the machine, and a rudder of two vertical planes about six
feet long and one foot apart in the rear of the machine were under
control by levers close to the hands of the pilot, who, prostrate on the
lower large plane, directed the course up or down, to the right or left
at will. But the most remarkable features of all were the gasoline
engine that was to give motive power and the propellers by which that
power was to move the machine in its flight through the air. The
mechanism, the result of patient study and arduous labor, had been
perfected in the little shop at Dayton and had been brought to the
barren sand coast of North Carolina for its first practical test. The
engine, which developed sixteen horse power, was connected by chains
with the two propellers, each eight feet in diameter at the rear of the
biplane. The total weight was 750 pounds.
To give the machine a "start" it was driven rapidly along an iron rail
by a cable attached to a weight of one ton suspended at the top of a
derrick. When everything was at last in readiness, the engine was
started, the propellers were set in rapid motion, the weight at the top
of the derrick was released, the biplane was driven rapidly forward, and
lo! bearing a man, it skimmed over the sand dunes! It continued only
eleven seconds but landed without injury to pilot or machine. A small
beginning indeed, but it proved the practicability of man flight and
ushered in the era of aviation. A few days earlier in the same month on
the banks of the Potomac a crowd of witnesses saw with keen
disappointment the failure of Professor Langley's flying machine, and as
they turned away said mentally and not a few of them audibly,
"Impracticable!" "It can't be done." On the sand near Kitty Hawk, in the
presence only of the inventors and five others, life savers and
fishermen from Kill Devil Hill Station near by, fortune rewarded two
brothers unknown to the world and they achieved what had long been
regarded as impracticable and impossible. Professor Langley worked long
and patiently on his models and was very properly given $50,000 by the
government to aid in an enterprise that was to give man dominion of the
air. The Wright brothers with the same faith and unflagging zeal worked
secretly in their little shop at Dayton without financial assistance and
out of their small earnings conducted experiments on the Carolina coast,
doing their own cooking to lighten expenses, and solved the problem that
had thwarted the inventive genius of the world. No crowds, appreciating
the significance of the event were present to applaud, nor did the
brothers exult over the achievement. It was indeed only what they had
confidently expected.
On the day of their initial success two other nights of slightly longer
duration were made. The fourth flight continued fifty-nine seconds,
almost a minute, and extended over a distance of 853 feet. The machine
was then carried back to camp. In an unguarded moment it was caught by a
gust of wind, rolled violently over the ground and was partially
wrecked. But what mattered the loss? For the first time in the history
of the world a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power
into the air in free flight, had sailed forward on a level course
without reduction of speed and had landed without being wrecked.