better running condition. The
reporters had now, no doubt, lost confidence in the machine, though
their reports, in kindness, concealed it. Later, when they heard that
we were making flights of several minutes' duration, knowing that longer
flights had been made with airships, and not knowing any essential
difference between airships and flying machines, they were but little
interested.

'We had not been flying long in 1904 before we found that the problem of
equilibrium had not as yet been entirely solved. Sometimes, in making
a circle, the machine would turn over sidewise despite anything the
operator could do, although, under the same conditions in ordinary
straight flight it could have been righted in an instant. In one flight,
in 1905, while circling round a honey locust-tree at a height of about
50 feet, the machine suddenly began to turn up on one wing, and took a
course toward the tree. The operator, not relishing the idea of landing
in a thorn tree, attempted to reach the ground. The left wing, however,
struck the tree at a height of 10 or 12 feet from the ground and carried
away several branches; but the flight, which had already covered a
distance of six miles, was continued to the starting point.

'The causes of these troubles--too technical for explanation here--were
not entirely overcome till the end of September, 1905. The flights then
rapidly increased in length, till experiments were discontinued after
October 5 on account of the number of people attracted to the field.
Although made on a ground open on every side, and bordered on two sides
by much-travelled thoroughfares, with electric cars passing every hour,
and seen by all the people living in the neighbourhood for miles around,
and by several hundred others, yet these flights have been made by some
newspapers the subject of a great "mystery."'

Viewing their work from the financial side, the two brothers incurred
but little expense in the earlier gliding experiments, and, indeed,
viewed these only as recreation, limiting their expenditure to that
which two men might spend on any hobby. When they had once achieved
successful power-driven flight, they saw the possibilities of their
work, and abandoned such other business as had engaged their energies,
sinking all their capital in the development of a practical flying
machine. Having, in 1905, improved their designs to such an extent that
they could consider their machine a practical aeroplane, they