The History: Wilbur had traveled to Chicago on June 24th to lecture on the brothers' gliding experiments for the Western Society of Engineers. Octave Chanute was present at the lecture and he had the opportunity to discuss Captain Ferber's gliding lesson request with Wilbur.

Wilbur conveyed to Chanute that he would need to discuss the matter with Orville. However, he was concerned about Ferber's true motivation based on a statement quoted in La Locomotion. In the April 11th edition, Ferber was quoted as saying "and the aeroplane must not be allowed to be perfected in America ...."

Today, Chanute wrote Wilbur. Not hearing a response from Wilbur on the subject, Chanute explained to Wilbur he had written Ferber on June 28th. Chanute told Ferber he did not anticipate Ferber would receive an invitation to the Wrights' North Carolina camp for gliding lessons this year.

Chanute wrote that the text of Wilbur's presentation had been accepted for publication by the Society in August over other papers which had been submitted earlier.

Chanute also followed up on several other questions in this letter.

• Chanute was developing an article for a French science publication, Revue Generale des Sciences. Chanute asked if he could discuss wing-warping [the Wrights' method of controlling side-to-side motion and turns]. "Somebody may be hurt if it is not [mentioned]."
• Chanute asked Wilbur how the area affected by head resistance [drag] on their machines was determined in their tests.
• Chanute requested to see one of the Wrights' gliding calculations.
• He asked Wilbur if he felt a copy of Chanute's new article for La Aerophile should be sent to Samuel Langley now or "let him wait till it comes out in print".

Chanute asked Wilbur how they determined the area affected by head resistance [drag] in their experiments. Even though an object/body may be very large, the airstream only impacts a certain portion of the body. In modern aerodynamics, the body area used in drag calculations takes this effect into consideration. For shapes such as blunt thick bodies (spheres, cylinders, cars, trucks, projectiles, torpedoes) the characteristic body area is the frontal area. For barges and surface ships the area used in the drag calculation is the "wetted" area and for wide flat bodies like wings it is the planform area. The planform is the length (called the span) multiplied by the chord (width) of the wing.