egrees. With this glider they went
in the summer of I 1900 to the little settlement of Kitty Hawk, North
Carolina, situated on the strip of land dividing Albemarle Sound from
the Atlantic. Here they reckoned on obtaining steady wind, and here, on
the day that they completed the machine, they took it out for trial as
a kite with the wind blowing at between twenty-five and thirty miles
an hour. They found that in order to support a man on it the glider
required an angle nearer twenty degrees than three, and even with the
wind at thirty miles an hour they could not get down to the planned
angle of three degrees. 'Later, when the wind was too light to support
the machine with a man on it, they tested it as a kite, working the
rudders by cords. Although they obtained satisfactory results in this
way they realised fully that actual gliding experience was necessary
before the tests could be considered practical.

A series of actual measurements of lift and drift of the machine gave
astonishing results. 'It appeared that the total horizontal pull of the
machine, while sustaining a weight of 52 lbs., was only 8.5 lbs., which
was less than had been previously estimated for head resistance of the
framing alone. Making allowance for the weight carried, it appeared that
the head resistance of the framing was but little more than fifty per
cent of the amount which Mr Chanute had estimated as the head resistance
of the framing of his machine. On the other hand, it appeared sadly
deficient in lifting power as compared with the calculated lift of
curved surfaces of its size... we decided to arrange our machine for the
following year so that the depth of curvature of its surfaces could be
varied at will, and its covering air-proofed.'

After these experiments the brothers decided to turn to practical
gliding, for which they moved four miles to the south, to the Kill Devil
sandhills, the principal of which is slightly over a hundred feet
in height, with an inclination of nearly ten degrees on its main
north-western slope. On the day after their arrival they made about a
dozen glides, in which, although the landings were made at a speed of
more than twenty miles an hour, no injury was sustained either by the
machine or by the operator.

'The slope of the hill was 9.5 degrees, or a drop of one foot in six. We
found that after attaining a speed of about twenty-five to thirty miles
with reference to the wind, or ten to fifteen miles over th