Charles—Charlie—Taylor had been born on a farm in Illinois and arrived in Dayton in 1896, still in his twenties, looking for work as a mechanic. Employed first making farm machinery, he had soon set up his own machine shop, and from time to time helped out with the Wrights, making coaster brakes and other parts for their bicycles. Unlike the bachelor brothers, Charlie was married with two children, and he smoked cigars, one after another nearly all day. He also worked quite as hard as they and with skill rarely to be found.
Stopping by the bicycle shop one evening that June just to “gas,” as he said, he was asked if he would like to work there full-time. “They offered me $18 a week,” he later recalled. “That was pretty good money. . . . Besides, I liked the Wrights. . . . So far as I can figure out, Will and Orv hired me to worry about their bicycle business so they could concentrate on their flying studies and experiments. . . . And I must have satisfied them for they didn’t hire anyone else for eight years.”
Of all those who were to enter the lives of the brothers, few were to prove of such value and none was to so aggravate sister Katharine.
Wilbur and Orville left Dayton together on their second expedition to Kitty Hawk by train the evening of Sunday, July 7, 1901, and for the next several weeks were to experience conditions that made those they had known during their previous visit seem like mere inconveniences.
They arrived at Elizabeth City just after one of the worst hurricanes in memory, with winds recorded at 93 miles an hour. Two days passed before they were able to sail for Kitty Hawk.
After a night at the Tates’, sharing the most uncomfortable bed either had ever endured, they set off for the foot of Kill Devil Hills and in an all-day drenching rain began setting up camp, a big part of which at that location required driving a pipe 10 to 12 feet into the ground to serve as a well, there being no source of fresh water within a mile.
It was Bill Tate who told them how to get “good water” and who arranged permission from the owners of the land at Kill Devil Hills to establish themselves there.
Because the new glider was to be so large, the shed or hangar for it had also to be good-sized. Orville would proudly describe what they built as a “grand institution with awnings at both ends, that is, with big doors hinged at the top, which we swing open and prop up.” In little time, with pine boards shipped over from Elizabeth City, they built a long, solid shed, 16 by 25 feet and 6 feet in height, that would have been considered by many a substantial accomplishment in itself, and they did it in remarkably little time.
Then, just as they were about to start work on the glider, they were hit by misery of a kind and on a scale they had never experienced or even imagined.
Among long-standing summer visitors to Nags Head, the old wisdom was that the infamous Outer Banks “skeeters” struck en masse only once every ten or twelve years. On July 18, it suddenly became clear 1901 was one of those years. As Orville wrote, the mosquitoes appeared “in the form of a mighty cloud, almost darkening the sun.” It was by far the worst experience of his life, he would tell Katharine. The agonies of typhoid fever were “as nothing” by comparison. There was no way of escaping the mosquitoes.
The sand and grass and trees and hills and everything was fairly covered with them. They chewed us clear through our underwear and socks. Lumps began swelling up all over my body like hen’s eggs. We attempted to escape by going to bed, which we did at a little after five o’clock. . . . We put our cots out under the awnings and wrapped up in our blankets with only our noses protruding from the folds, thus exposing the least possible surface to attack.
Until then the wind had been blowing at 20 miles an hour. Now it had dropped off entirely and the summer heat kept mounting.
Our blankets then became unbearable. The perspiration would roll off of us in torrents. We would partly uncover and the mosquitoes would swoop down upon us in vast multitudes. We would make a few desperate and vain slaps, and again retire behind our blankets. Misery! Misery!
Morning brought little relief from the suffering. At first they tried working, but had to give up, so unrelenting was the onslaught. In preparation for the night ahead they built frames and mosquito nets for their cots, then moved the cots 20 to 30 feet from the tent, and crawled in under the nets and again under their blankets. None of this worked. Such was the torture of the night that followed, Orville vowed that come morning they would head for home.
By morning, however, their characteristic resolve returned. The demon mosquitoes had diminished appreciably and in the days to come grew fewer still. But the torment they had been through would never be forgotten.
As it happened, one of the two men Octave Chanute wished to have join the brothers in their experiments had arrived just as the mosquitoes struck and so shared in the miseries. He was Edward Huffaker of Chuckey City, Tennessee, a former employee of the Smithsonian Institution and author of a Smithsonian pamphlet, On Soaring Flight. Now a protégé of Chanute, he had brought with him a disassembled glider of his own design built at Chanute’s expense. To Wilbur and Orville he seemed at first a welcome addition.
The second to join the group, young George Alexander Spratt from Coatesville, Pennsylvania, had little in the way of appropriate background for the work at hand. Chanute had described him as having medical training that could prove valuable in case of an accident, but Spratt had abandoned his medical ambitions after finishing medical school several years before. About all he could offer as reason for his participation was that flying had been the dream of his life, which was altogether true. He arrived in the last days of the mosquito siege.
The hangar-workshop at Kill Devil Hills was now to provide lodging for four. As the chief cook, Orville arranged a corner kitchen with a gas stove fashioned out of a metal barrel and shelves lined with canned goods—Arm & Hammer baking soda, Chase & Sanborn coffee, Royal Purple Hand-Packed tomatoes, Gold Dust Green Gage plums. Fresh butter, eggs, bacon, and watermelon had to be carried on foot from Kitty Hawk.
Huffaker expressed amazement at the brothers’ “mechanical facility” but was to prove increasingly irksome to them, lazy and indifferent about such daily necessities as washing dishes. He was also inclined to make use of the personal possessions of the others without bothering to ask permission. As tiresome as anything for the sons of Bishop Wright was to hear Huffaker go on about “character building,” rather than hard work, being the great aim in life. The more they learned about the glider he had designed and planned to test but never did, the more they considered it a joke.