It was a Sunday, likely in the morning, on May 13, 1900, when a dogged, thoughtful 33-year-old mechanic in the Midwest composed
Octave Chanute, 68 then, the son of French immigrants who moved from Paris to New Orleans in 1838, when Octave was 6 and his father accepted a position as vice president and history professor at Jefferson College, had risen in his field until he retired from the Chicago and Alton Railroad as its chief engineer at 51, to become an independent consultant and became wealthy from developing creosote as a preservative for railroad ties. Plump and round-faced, the Chicagoan looked, said the writer James Tobin, “like a slightly indignant owl.”
Chanute spent his advancing age pursuing his dream of a flying machine. In a time when there was virtual unanimity that if man had been meant to fly, he would have had wings, Chanute was one of just three eminent men in America (the others were Samuel Langley and Alexander Graham Bell) who believed it could and would be done. Although he conducted his own piloted glider experiments, including along the south end of Lake Michigan between 1896 and 1898, Chanute also served as a crucial clearinghouse and connector for anyone else who took up the mantle, conducted experiments and suffered the ridicule.
“For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man,” the mechanic wrote to Chanute. “My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money if not my life. I have been trying to arrange my affairs in such a way that I can devote my entire time for a few months to experiment in this field.”
The mechanic had read Chanute’s “Progress in Flying Machines,” published in 1894, an illustrated compendium of every known attempt from J. B. Dante, an Italian mathematician of Perugia, “who toward the end of the 14th century seems to have succeeded in constructing a set of artificial wings with which he sailed over the neighboring lake of Trasimene,” to E. C. Huffaker, an indolent physicist from Chuckey, Tennessee, who in 1893 built a model glider with concavo-convex surfaces that could rise 15 feet in a steady breeze.
Will, the mechanic, had some ideas of his own and he wanted to know from Chanute “to what extent similar plans have been tested and found to be failures, and also to obtain such suggestions as your great knowledge and experience might enable you to give me.” He wanted to build a tower from which he could launch and pilot his conception of a glider, “using the torsion principle.” Did Chanute know of a place where he could do this, with dependable winds of about 15 mph?
Yes, Chanute wrote back four days later, in the second of several hundred letters the pair would exchange.
Chanute was skeptical about the tower, “quite in sympathy” with Will’s proposal, and suggested he seek sand hills on the Atlantic coast, along the Carolinas.
Will Wright wrote to weather stations at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and the wild Outer Banks of North Carolina. He got no response from Myrtle Beach, but the operator of the weather station at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, said he thought he had what was needed; and Will and his brother Orv, who shared the same mix of ambition and humility, packed their trunks in Dayton, Ohio, and began the most auspicious ascent in history.
