As steady winds of eleven miles an hour, the least that would do for starting from a 160-foot track, were not frequent, the Wrights had to be in readiness to take advantage of occasional gusts of strong wind. With their machine on the track, they waited until they could “see” a flurry of wind coming--that is, until they could see weeds being agitated by the wind in the distance. Then they would start the motor and run the machine down the track to meet the wind gust when it reached the end of the rail. In that way they sometimes succeeded in making a start on a day generally calm. But one such start ended disastrously, and Orville, who was piloting the machine, had one of his narrowest escapes. When the machine first met the flurry of wind, it rose rapidly, but a second later it was on the ground with the wings pointing vertically into the air. It had dived at a steep angle, throwing Orville forward to the ground. The upper wing spar came down across the middle of his back. But luckily, a section about two feet wide, just wide enough to miss hitting him, was broken out. No other damage was done to the spar, and the Wrights could never account for the seemingly miraculous breakage that provided a space for safety over the very place where Orville lay on the ground. After that accident, Charlie Taylor, who had seen other narrow escapes, gloomily told the neighbors across the road that every time he saw one of the brothers start on a flight he felt that he was seeing him alive for the last time. Early in July the Wrights made alterations in the machine which located the center of gravity farther toward the rear than it had been before. In the first trial after those alterations, the machine, after leaving the track, kept turning up more and more and looked as if it were going to loop the loop. The center of gravity was so far back that the front elevator, even when turned to its limit, could not check the upward turn. While pointing vertically upward, the machine came to a stop and then began to slide backward. By the time it reached the ground it was once more so nearly level that if the skids had had a slight upward bend at their rear ends, the landing might have been made without damage. As it was, the rear ends of the skids dug into the ground; but the damage was slight. Before their experiments had progressed far in 1904 the Wrights saw that a better method of launching the machine was needed. They decided that a derrick with a falling weight would be the simplest and cheapest device. A 1,600-pound weight, falling a distance of 16½ feet, was so geared with ropes and pulleys that it produced a 350-pound pull on the machine through a distance of 49½ feet. By this arrangement the machine could be put into the air after a run of only 50 feet, even in a dead calm. Shifting the track was now seldom necessary.