"Some Aeronautical Experiments," in Journal of the Western Society of Engineers, Vol. VI, No. 6, December 1901, p 489. 8° (230 x 155 mm). 11 half-tone illustrations, 8 after photographs of the Wright brothers' glider, and 2-line diagrams in text. Bound in three-quarter black calf and black cloth boards with all of Volume VI (1901, issues 1 - 5) in a single volume. Small tear to the inside left sheets of approx. first half of the first issue including one diagram separation, but otherwise fine throughout and the important No. 6 in very fine condition. Rare. 

Wilbur Wright delivered his address before the Western Society of Engineers at the Monadnock Building in Chicago, in September 1901 at the invitation of Octave Chanute, a French-born civil engineer whose passion for aeronautics made him "an international clearing house for information on aviation" (The Wright Brothers: Heirs of Prometheus, Smithsonian Institution 1978, p. 15), and whose own carefully tabulated gliding experiments in 1896 and 1897 paved the way for the Wrights' later successes. It was first printed here, and then reprinted in a variety of other journals and magazines, including Scientific American and the annual report of the Smithsonian Institution.

The 1896 death of Otto Lilienthal in a glider crash reawakened Orville and Wilbur Wright's interest in aeronautics, and, after three years intensely studying the existing aeronautical literature, the brothers built their first flying machine, a biplane kite-glider with a 5-foot wingspread. Their glider was modeled upon Octave Chanute's five-plane glider, but incorporated wing-warps--Wilbur Wright's solution to the problem of lateral control. A year later they built their first full-sized glider with a 17 foot span, and in the summer of 1900, a still larger glider with a 22-foot wing-span. The present paper, which Wilbur read to the Western Society of Engineers on September 18, 1901, describes these progressive developments and the brothers' trial flights at the beach of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in the summer of 1901, during which they achieved glides of up to 389 feet. "Their work was painstaking, thoroughly scientific, with a careful tabulation of data and critical examination of all conclusions. The glides indicated that a vertical steering rudder was essential... and that calculations based on existing data were in error" (DAB). In order to perfect their machine's performance, the Wrights returned to Dayton to pursue their aerodynamic research.