400 : The Atlantic 



financed out of public funds. He was known to the President and his 

 experimental flights attracted great public interests in the nation's 

 capital. 



The Wright brothers were a contrast to Langley in almost every 

 respect. They were young and obscure. They earned, begged and bor- 

 rowed the funds of less than |i,ooo required to build their first ma- 

 chine. They had no scientific reputation and no special scientific train- 

 ing, being for the most part self-taught. They worked in obscurity 

 from choice and carried on their open air experiments at Kill Devil 

 Hill on the seacoast of North Carolina. This location suited them 

 not only because the weather bureau had said that it was here that 

 they could find the strongest and steadiest winds but also because it 

 was so remote that sightseers and attendant publicity would not 

 encumber their efforts. 



For a number of years the Wright brothers in Dayton and at Kitty 

 Hawk worked on the problem of flight. They had evolved the idea of 

 warping the wings of a plane as a method of providing stability and 

 control. Their glider experiments began at Kitty Hawk in 1900 and 

 continued through the succeeding years. During this time they also 

 built the first wind tunnel for their experiments. In 1902, in their 

 third glider, they completed more than 1,000 successful glides. By 

 1903 they had built their own four-cylinder gasoline engine and 

 mounted it in a biplane. 



In December of that year they achieved several flights, the longest 

 of which kept them in the air for almost a minute and covered 852 

 feet against a twenty-mile wind. Their flights were witnessed by 

 some of the personnel of the coast guard station and one or two peo- 

 ple from a nearby town. 



These early flights attracted little public attention; in fact, the coun- 

 try was so skeptical that only three newspapers carried any accounts 

 of the event and these were extremely inaccurate. It was some months 

 before the first adequate description of the machine and of the flights 

 were put in circulation. 



Throughout 1904 and 1905 they continued to build and rebuild and 

 fly machines in a field near Dayton. The first official recognition their 

 accomplishment received was from the British government which 

 sent a representative to visit them at Dayton at the end of 1904, con- 

 firmed by a letter from the War Office of February 11, 1905, asking 

 the Wright brothers to submit terms for the purchase of their ma- 

 chine. At the same time the United States government disclaimed any 

 interest in the Wright brothers' machine. 



