The year following they returned to the same place with a larger machine considerably improved, but it still failed to lift the operator. Octave Chanute, of Chicago, with whom they had been in correspondence, came to witness their tests and examine their glider. They now decided to abandon much of the “scientific data” which they had collected from the writings of others and proceeded in the light of their own experience. They coasted down the air from the tops of sand dunes and tested with satisfaction their devices for guiding their air craft. In 1902, with additional improvements, they made almost one thousand gliding flights, some of which carried them a little over six hundred feet, more than twice the distance attained the previous year. All this time their object had been to control the machine while in air. Only after this was accomplished did they propose to add motive power to keep it above the earth. They wisely reasoned that it would be useless to apply this power to a machine that could not be directed and controlled. The First Flight The Wrights had now reached a point where they felt that they were ready to apply motive power, rise like a bird from the earth and direct their course through the air. A new machine was built with two planes, each six feet six inches wide and measuring forty feet from tip to tip. The planes were arranged one directly above the other with an intervening space of six feet. An elevating rudder of two horizontal planes ten feet in front of the machine, and a rudder of two vertical planes about six feet long and one foot apart in the rear of the machine were under control by levers close to the hands of the pilot, who, prostrate on the lower large plane, directed the course up or down, to the right or left at will. But the most remarkable features of all were the gasoline engine that was to give motive power and the propellers by which that power was to move the machine in its flight through the air. The mechanism, the result of patient study and arduous labor, had been perfected in the little shop at Dayton and had been brought to the barren sand coast of North Carolina for its first practical test. The engine, which developed sixteen horse power, was connected by chains with the two propellers, each eight feet in diameter at the rear of the biplane. The total weight was 750 pounds.