Engineers in September of 1901, under the
presidency of Octave Chanute. In that lecture Wilbur detailed the way
in which he and his brother came to interest themselves in aeronautical
problems and constructed their first glider. He speaks of his own
notice of the death of Lilienthal in 1896, and of the way in which this
fatality roused him to an active interest in aeronautical problems,
which was stimulated by reading Professor Marey's Animal Mechanism, not
for the first time. 'From this I was led to read more modern works, and
as my brother soon became equally interested with myself, we soon passed
from the reading to the thinking, and finally to the working stage. It
seemed to us that the main reason why the problem had remained so long
unsolved was that no one had been able to obtain any adequate practice.
We figured that Lilienthal in five years of time had spent only about
five hours in actual gliding through the air. The wonder was not that he
had done so little, but that he had accomplished so much. It would not
be considered at all safe for a bicycle rider to attempt to ride through
a crowded city street after only five hours' practice, spread out in
bits of ten seconds each over a period of five years; yet Lilienthal
with this brief practice was remarkably successful in meeting the
fluctuations and eddies of wind-gusts. We thought that if some method
could be found by which it would be possible to practice by the hour
instead of by the second there would be hope of advancing the solution
of a very difficult problem. It seemed feasible to do this by building a
machine which would be sustained at a speed of eighteen miles per hour,
and then finding a locality where winds of this velocity were common.
With these conditions a rope attached to the machine to keep it from
floating backward would answer very nearly the same purpose as a
propeller driven by a motor, and it would be possible to practice by the
hour, and without any serious danger, as it would not be necessary to
rise far from the ground, and the machine would not have any forward
motion at all. We found, according to the accepted tables of air
pressure on curved surfaces, that a machine spreading 200 square feet of
wing surface would be sufficient for our purpose, and that places would
easily be found along the Atlantic coast where winds of sixteen to
twenty-five miles were not at all uncommon. When the winds were low it
was our plan to glide from the to