This year they were to have company in camp. Octave Chanute, with whom they had been in correspondence for about a year, stopped in Dayton in June, 1901, at their invitation, to get better acquainted. When he learned that the Wrights had carried on their experiments in 1900 without the presence of a doctor in camp, and were intending to do so again, he told them he thought that was too risky, considering the kind of work and the isolation of the experiment ground. He said he knew a young man in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, George A. Spratt, “an amateur” in aeronautics, who had had some medical training. Spratt had never seen any gliding experiments, and Chanute thought he would be eager for the opportunity. If the Wrights would board him at camp, Chanute said, he would be glad to pay Spratt’s traveling expenses to Kitty Hawk and would consider himself “compensated by the pleasure given to him.” Chanute also proposed that they have in camp with them E. C. Huffaker, of Chuckey City, Tennessee, who was building a glider that Chanute was financing, and the Wrights consented. Thus there were four regularly in camp that season, and for a time Chanute himself was with them as a guest. The new machine was completed and ready for trial on the afternoon of July 27. Since it was designed to be flown in a wind of seventeen miles, and there was but thirteen miles of wind on that day, the brothers took the machine to the big Kill Devil Hill for its first trial. After five or six short tuning-up flights they made a glide of 315 feet in nineteen seconds. Although several flights on this first day of experiments in 1901 exceeded the best made the year before, yet it was soon evident that in several respects the machine was not as good as the first one. It was found that the wings, with a camber of one to twelve--the camber recommended by Lilienthal, and used by Chanute and others--was not so good as the camber of one to twenty-two, used by the Wrights in 1900. (Camber of one to twenty-two means that the length of the chord, the straight-line distance between the front and rear edges of the wings, is twenty-two times the distance _from_ the chord to the deepest part of the wing curve.) This was demonstrated by the fact that the 1901 machine could not glide on a slope as nearly level as had the earlier machine. The Wrights found, too, that a machine with wings of one to twelve camber was not so easily controlled fore and aft as when the wings were of one to twenty-two camber. They decided therefore to reduce the camber of the wings to make them more like those of the earlier machine. When they resumed their gliding, after the camber had been reduced (one to eighteen), the control of the machine appeared to be as good as it was the year before, and they then made flights in winds of twenty-two to twenty-seven miles an hour, without accident. Though in most of these flights the lateral control was highly effective, in a few others--under conditions seemingly the