If Chanute took issue with anything Wilbur said, or was in any way offended, he never let on. In a letter written after he finished proofreading the speech before publication, Chanute called it “a devilish good paper which will be extensively quoted.”
That Wilbur returned to Dayton from Chicago even more grateful for Chanute’s friendship and counsel can be seen in the increased volume of their correspondence. Over the next three months, until the end of the year, Wilbur would write to Chanute more than twelve times, or once a week on average. Some of the letters ran as long as seven to nine pages, and Chanute invariably replied without delay.
Meanwhile, an article in the September issue of the popular McClure’s Magazine written by Simon Newcomb, a distinguished astronomer and professor at Johns Hopkins University, dismissed the dream of flight as no more than a myth. And were such a machine devised, he asked, what useful purpose could it possibly serve? “The first successful flyer will be the handiwork of a watchmaker, and will carry nothing heavier than an insect.”
With their former trust in the calculations of Lilienthal and Chanute shattered, the brothers set out that autumn of 1901 to crack the code of aeronautics themselves. It was a brave decision and a crucial turning point.
Of primary importance was to find a way to achieve accurate measurements of the “lift” and “drag” of a wing’s surface, and the ingenuity, as well as patience, they brought to their experiments were like nothing done by anyone until then. For three months, working in one of the upstairs rooms at the bicycle shop, they concentrated nearly all of their time on these “investigations” and with stunning results.
They devised and built a small-scale wind tunnel—a wooden box 6 feet long and 16 inches square, with one end open and a fan mounted at the other end, and this powered, since the shop had no electricity, by an extremely noisy gasoline engine. The box stood on four legs about waist high.
Although a wind tunnel had been used by an English experimenter, Francis Herbert Wenham, as early as the 1870s, and by several others since, including Hiram Maxim, their tests were nothing like those of the brothers, who proceeded entirely on their own and in their own way.
For testing apparatus inside the box, they used old hacksaw blades cut to different sizes with tin shears and hammered into a variety of shapes and thicknesses—some flat, some concave and convex, or square or oblong, and each about six inches square and one-thirty-second of an inch thick—these strung on bicycle spoke wires.
Though such apparatus did not look like much, it was to prove of immense value. For nearly two months the brothers tested some thirty-eight wing surfaces, setting the “balances” or “airfoils”—the different-shaped hacksaw blades—at angles from 0 to 45 degrees in winds up to 27 miles per hour. It was a slow, tedious process, but as Orville wrote, “those metal models told us how to build.”
Octave Chanute was astonished by what Wilbur had to report. “It is perfectly marvelous to me how quickly you get results with your testing machine,” he wrote. “You are evidently better equipped to test the endless variety of curved surfaces than anybody has ever been.” When Wilbur apologized for writing to him at such length, Chanute assured him his letters were always too brief.
The work was unlike anything the brothers had ever undertaken and the most demanding of their time and powers of concentration. They were often at it past midnight. As said later in the Aeronautical Journal of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, “Never in the history of the world had men studied the problem with such scientific skill nor with such undaunted courage.”
In December came another voice of scientific authority denouncing, as Simon Newcomb had, the dream of flight as a total sham, the article appearing in the greatly respected North American Review, and written by no less than the chief engineer of the United States Navy, Rear Admiral George Melville. “A calm survey of certain natural phenomena leads the engineer to pronounce all confident prophecies for future success as wholly unwarranted, if not absurd. Where, even to this hour, are we to look for the germ of the successful flying machine? Where is the preparation today?”
By late December, their experiments finished and feeling the pressure of economic necessity, the brothers turned to the production of the next season’s bicycles. As Charlie Taylor liked to stress, they had to keep the business going to pay for the experiments. Octave Chanute wrote to say how greatly he regretted their decision.
For some time Chanute had been offering to provide financial help to the brothers, which they greatly appreciated but were unwilling to accept. “Practically all the expense of our aeronautical experiments lies in the time consumed and we do not wish to increase the temptation to neglect our regular business for it,” Wilbur wrote to him.
What if some rich man were to provide $10,000 a year, Chanute asked, adding that he happened to know Andrew Carnegie. “Would you like for me to write to him?” Again Wilbur tactfully declined. Besides, he added, it seemed likely Carnegie was “too hardheaded a Scotchman to become interested in such a visionary pursuit as flying.”
As he and Orville had no need to say, they knew full well the importance of what they had achieved with their “laboratory work.” They had done it together on their own, paying their own way, as they did everything, and they intended to keep going on their own.
Not for another several months, until the spring of 1902, were they able to begin building a new glider based on all they had learned from the wind tunnel tests, for even with the help of Charlie Taylor, production and sales of their bicycles still demanded a great part of their time and attention.
Word of what they were up to seems also to have been getting around in some circles and apparently with their approval if not at their own instigation. For on January 25, 1902, a short, unsigned notice appeared in the Dayton Daily News stating for the first time in any publication that two local “aeronautical experts” had demonstrated “to an absolute certainty that many of the theories heretofore advanced in flying machine circles may be cast to the four winds.
These gentlemen are Wilbur and Orville Wright, cycle dealers and makers, who have experimented with marked success in [North] Carolina and who at present bid fair to revolutionize the work of experts in making tests of aerial navigation. . . .
It would be fitting that Dayton should afford experiments which may lead to a complete solution to aerial navigation.
This notice, carefully clipped from the paper by the brothers, or perhaps Katharine, would figure prominently at the beginning of a first scrapbook documenting their efforts.