With the advance of the spring of 1904, Wilbur and Orville could be seen out in the grass at Huffman Prairie swinging scythes or working with shovels leveling off ground hog mounds. When it came to building a shed in which to assemble and store their new machine, they put it in a corner as far removed from the trolley stop as the field permitted.
Prior to their first test flight, lest anyone think them overly secretive, the brothers invited friends and neighbors to come and watch. The press would be welcome, too, but on the condition that no photographs be taken. Their concern centered on the chance of photographs being used to study those devices and control mechanisms of their own invention, which set their machine apart from others.
On May 23, a Monday, despite an early morning rain, some fifty spectators gathered at Huffman Prairie. Bishop Wright, Katharine, Lorin and family were all present, as were a dozen or more reporters. But there was too little wind, and the test flight had to be postponed. Motor or not, wind was still essential.
On Wednesday, when the crowd gathered again, rain caused another cancellation. The morning after, May 26, there was more rain. But then, during a brief lull in the afternoon, and with hardly any wind and signs of another storm about to break, the brothers decided to “make a start.” With Orville at the controls, Flyer II rose a mere 8 feet and came down at once, within seconds after leaving the starting track. Something had gone wrong with the motor.
It was hardly a premiere to stir excitement or silence the doubters. A few reporters, in an attempt to say something of interest, either praised the sturdiness of the machine or took liberties with the facts, such as to say the plane had gone 75 feet in the air. Bishop Wright, who had been watching with perhaps greater anticipation than anyone present, could only record in his diary, and accurately, that Orville had flown all of 25 feet.
It would be speculated later by some that the failure that day had been a hoax staged as a way to deflate further interest by the public and the press. But this seems absurd given the nature of the brothers and the fact that almost nothing went right for them for the next three months.
On June 10 the machine hit ground because of faulty steering. Another day, a tail was smashed during a landing. “Tail stick broken in starting,” Wilbur recorded of his flight on August 2. On another, the tail wires became “disarranged.” On August 5, Orville “struck ground at start.” Wilbur went again on August 8 and a wing hit the ground before leaving the track. Two days later, a rudder was smashed, a propeller broken. It seemed, as Wilbur would say, they had become “a little rusty” at the art of flying.
“There was nothing spectacular about these many trials,” remembered Werthner, the high school science teacher who was lending the brothers a hand with “their great white bird,” as he called it, “but the good humor of Wilbur, after a spill out of the machine, or a break somewhere, or a stubborn motor, was always reassuring.
Their patient perseverance, their calm faith in ultimate success, their mutual consideration of each other, might have been considered phenomenal in any but men who were well born and well reared. These flights, or spurts at flying, they always made in turn; and after every trial the two inventors, quite apart, held long and confidential consultation, with always some new gain; they were getting nearer and nearer the moment when sustained flight would be made, for a machine that could maintain itself aloft two minutes might just as well stay there an hour, if everything were as intended.
At last, on August 13, to their utter amazement, Wilbur flew over a thousand feet, farther than any of the flights at Kitty Hawk and five times what they had been able to do thus far at Huffman Prairie.
“Have you heard what they’re up to out there?” people in town would say. “Oh, yes,” would be the usual answer, and the conversation would move on. Few took any interest in the matter or in the two brothers who were to become Dayton’s greatest heroes ever. Even those riding the interurban line seem to have paid little or no attention to what could occasionally be seen in passing, or to the brothers themselves as they traveled back and forth from town on the same trolley looking little different from other commuters.
An exception was Luther Beard, managing editor of the Dayton Journal, who, because of a class he taught occasionally at a school near Huffman Prairie, rode the interurban as far as Simms Station. “I used to chat with them in a friendly way and was always polite to them,” Beard would recall, “because I sort of felt sorry for them. They seemed like well-meaning, decent enough young men. Yet there they were, neglecting their business to waste their time day after day on that ridiculous flying machine.”
They were also putting their lives at risk, as well they knew. On a flight on August 24, hit by a sudden gust of wind, Orville smashed into the ground at 30 miles an hour and though he suffered no broken bones was so badly shaken and bruised he was unable to fly for another month.
Where Samuel Langley had required the least wind possible for his aerodrome experiments, the Wrights needed more wind. Clearly at Huffman Prairie they would have to make up for what had been so plentiful at Kitty Hawk, to devise, in Wilbur’s words, some way to “render us independent of wind.” The solution would have to be both simple and inexpensive, and so once again straightforward improvisation solved the problem.
They designed and built their own “starting apparatus,” a catapult powered by nothing more than gravity. Its components consisted of a 20-foot tent-shaped tower, or derrick. Made with four wooden poles, it looked like a drilling rig. At the apex, over a pulley, hung by a single rope metal weights totaling as much as 1,600 pounds. The rest of the rope ran from the base of the tower down the launching track on pulleys to the end of the track to another pulley. Then the rope ran back again to the starting point, where it hitched on to the front of the Flyer, which sat on the launching track on a large rimmed bicycle hub.
With a team of horses the brothers would haul the weights up to the top of the derrick. Then, when all was ready, the pilot would release the rope, the weights would drop, the machine would be pulled rapidly down to the end of the track, then shoot into the air at a speed greater by far than possible when attempting takeoff by motor only.
On September 7, with scarcely any wind, Wilbur tested the new catapult for the first time, starting with only 200 pounds of weights. By day’s end, having added another 400 pounds, he could take off with no difficulties and flew longer distances than ever. Little more than a week later, on September 15, he not only flew fully half a mile but for the first time succeeded in turning a half circle, a major achievement.