Nowhere in the talk had he said a word about the gasoline engine sitting in the back room of the bicycle shop at Dayton; or of his and Orville’s intense, often maddening work on propellers; or of what they would be up to at Kitty Hawk in only a matter of months. When the subject of motors came into discussion, he simply kept to the past tense. “As none of our experiments has been with power machines, my judgment . . . may be of little value.”
