very thought became a duet. Wilbur, who died in
1912, was a man of a steady mind and of a dominant character, hard-knit,
quiet, intense. He has left some writings which reflect his nature; they
have a certain grim humour, and they mean business; they push aside all
irrelevance, and go straight to the point. After adventures in printing
and journalism the two brothers set up at Dayton as cycle manufacturers.
The death of Lilienthal, reported in the newspapers in 1896, first
called their attention to flight, and they began to read all available
books on the subject. They found that an immense amount of time and
money had been spent on the problem of human flight--all to no effect.
Makers of machines had abandoned their efforts. As for gliders, after
the death of Lilienthal, Mr. Chanute had discontinued his experiments,
and, a little later, Mr. Pilcher fell and was killed. When knowledge of
these things came to the brothers, it appealed to them like a challenge.
From 1899 onwards they turned all their thoughts to the problem. They
watched the flight of birds to see if they could surprise the secret of
balance. They studied gliding machines, and resolved to construct a
machine of their own, more or less on the model of Mr. Chanute's most
successful glider, which was a biplane, or 'double-decker'. When their
machine was partly built, they wrote to the weather bureau at
Washington, and learned that the strongest and most constant winds were
to be found on the coast of North Carolina. They then wrote to the
postmaster of Kitty Hawk, who testified that the sand-hills of that
place were round and soft, well fitted for boys playing with flying
machines. They took the parts of their machine to Kitty Hawk, assembled
and completed it in a tent, and forthwith began their long years of
continuous and progressive experiment. Their chief helper was Mr.
Chanute. 'In the summer of 1901', they said, 'we became personally
acquainted with Mr. Chanute. When he learned that we were interested in
flying as a sport and not with any expectation of recovering the money
we were expending on it, he gave us much encouragement. At our
invitation he spent several weeks with us at our camp at Kill Devil
Hill, four miles south of Kitty Hawk, during our experiments of that and
the two succeeding years.'

The first two summers, 1900 and 1901, brought them some familiarity in
the handling of their first two gliders, which they navigated lying face
downward