ng thrown from your seat, so often experienced
in automobile and railway travel. You find yourself facing toward the
point from which you started. The objects on the ground now seem to be
moving at much higher speed, though you perceive no change in the
pressure of the wind on your face. You know then that you are traveling
with the wind. When you near the starting-point the operator stops the
motor while still high in the air. The machine coasts down at an oblique
angle to the ground, and after sliding 50 or 100 feet, comes to rest.
Although the machine often lands when traveling at a speed of a mile a
minute, you feel no shock whatever, and cannot, in fact, tell the exact
moment at which it first touched the ground. The motor close beside you
kept up an almost deafening roar during the whole flight, yet in your
excitement you did not notice it till it stopped!

Our experiments have been conducted entirely at our own expense. In the
beginning we had no thought of recovering what we were expending, which
was not great, and was limited to what we could afford in recreation.
Later, when a successful flight had been made with a motor, we gave up
the business in which we were engaged, to devote our entire time and
capital to the development of a machine for practical uses. As soon as
our condition is such that constant attention to business is not
required, we expect to prepare for publication the results of our
laboratory experiments, which alone made an early solution of the flying
problem possible.

How We Made the First Flight

_By Orville Wright_

The flights of the 1902 glider had demonstrated the efficiency of our
system of maintaining equilibrium, and also the accuracy of the
laboratory work upon which the design of the glider was based. We then
felt that we were prepared to calculate in advance the performance of
machines with a degree of accuracy that had never been possible with the
data and tables possessed by our predecessors. Before leaving camp in
1902 we were already at work on the general design of a new machine
which we proposed to propel with a motor.

Immediately upon our return to Dayton, we wrote to a number of
automobile and motor builders, stating the purpose for which we desired
a motor, and asking whether they could furnish one that would develop
eight brake-horsepower, with a weight complete not exceeding 200 pounds.
Most of the companies answered that they were too busy with their
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