Part 15
During all their experiments at the Huffman pasture they had continued to ride “belly-buster,” as a boy usually does when coasting on a sled. Lying flat in that way and controlling the mechanism partly by swinging the hips from one side to the other was good enough for the experimental stages of aviation; but the Wrights knew that if a plane was to have practical use the pilot must be able to take an ordinary sitting position and do the controlling and guiding with his hands and feet as in an automobile. It was not all fun lying flat for an hour at a time with head raised to be on the lookout for possible obstacles. “I used to think,” said Orville in later years, “the back of my neck would break if I endured one more turn around the field.”
The brothers therefore had adopted a different arrangement of the control levers, for use in a sitting position, and a seat for a passenger. Moreover, the machine could be steered from either seat and thus was suitable for training other pilots if occasion should arise. The plane sent to France for possible trials in 1907 was thus equipped. They revamped the machine they had used at the Huffman pasture in 1905, and installed their later improvements. It now had an engine with vertical instead of horizontal cylinders. With this machine they would go to Kitty Hawk and gain needed practice in handling their new arrangement of the control levers.
The United States Government tests would be made at Fort Myer, Virginia, near Washington. Delivery of the machine had to be made by August 28, and the tests themselves were to begin shortly afterward, in September. But at about that same time, one of the brothers would make a demonstration in France. They had not yet decided which of them would fly at Fort Myer and which should go to France. But both had to be well prepared and there was no time to lose. They must be established at Kitty Hawk as soon as possible.
Wilbur Wright set out for Kitty Hawk ahead of Orville and arrived there April 9, 1908. He was joined within a week by a mechanic from Dayton, Charles W. Furnas. First of all, it was necessary to do much rebuilding of the camp. The buildings had not only suffered from storms, but had been stripped of much timber by persons who supposed the Wrights had permanently abandoned them. The plane was shipped in crates from Dayton April 11, but had to be left for some time in a freight depot at Elizabeth City until the new shed was completed at Kitty Hawk. Both Orville and the plane reached there on April 25.
It might have been expected that with at least two governments now showing interest in the Wright plane, each of the brothers would have been besieged en route by reporters and others. But the general public, including reporters, still seemed disinclined to believe in human flight. At about the same time that the Wrights were preparing to go to Kitty Hawk, a publisher brought out a new novel by H. G. Wells, _Tono-Bungay_, in which the leading character built a gliding machine “along the lines of the Wright brothers’ airplane,” and finally a flying-machine. That stirred one or two American book reviewers to chide the author for putting such fantastic material into a tale otherwise plausible.
Because of the persistence of that kind of incredulity, the Wrights did not expect many sightseers, least of all newspapermen, at Kitty Hawk during their preparations for government tests. Therefore they did not think it necessary to keep their plans secret. Though they weren’t seeking reporters, neither were they trying to avoid them. They simply went ahead without giving any thought to newspapermen one way or another. But the Wrights were about to be discovered.
Not until May 6 did either of the brothers make a flight. But the newspapers, instead of ignoring what the Wrights had done, now began to report what they had _not_ done. On May 1, the _Virginian-Pilot_, of Norfolk (the same paper that had reported, not too accurately, the first flight of an airplane), carried a wild tale that one of the Wright brothers had flown, the day before, ten miles out over the ocean! Practically the same story was widely published the next day. Katharine Wright on May 2 telegraphed her brothers that “the newspapers” had reported a flight. As the Wrights later learned, the _B. Z. Mittag_, in Berlin, carried a dispatch from Paris: “From America comes the news that the Wright brothers for the first time have made in public a controlled flight. The flight was made on April 30, at Norfolk, Va., before a U. S. Government Commission.”
That same story must have reached London, for the Wrights received a cablegram from Patrick Alexander: “Very hearty congratulations.”
Joseph Dosher, who had been the Weather Bureau man at Kitty Hawk in 1903, but was now stationed 30 miles north of Kitty Hawk, telephoned to the Kill Devil life-saving crew, on May 2, seeking information about the Wrights, presumably at the request of some newspaper. That same day, the Greensboro (N. C.) _News_ published a telegram from Elizabeth City, dated May 1, saying that the Wright brothers “of airship fame” were at Nag’s Head with their “famous flying-machine.”
On May 1, the New York _Herald_ had wired to the Weather Bureau operator at Manteo, on Roanoke Island, for information. And on May 2, the _Herald_ published an item with a Norfolk date line, that the Wrights were reported to have flown “over the ocean.” This dispatch appeared also in the _Herald’s_ Paris edition. Just below the report in the Paris edition was an editorial comment that if the Wrights had actually flown two miles, then they had broken the records of Delagrange and Farman in France. The _Herald_ editor evidently was still unaware that long before Delagrange, Farman, or other Wright copyists abroad had even left the ground in flight, the Wright brothers had flown twenty-four miles.
Inasmuch as the Wrights had not yet begun their flights of 1908, it was not easy for the New York _Herald_ to obtain confirmation or more details about the imaginary flight out over the ocean. No regularly employed newspaperman at Norfolk wanted to go to Kitty Hawk on what might be a wild goose chase. But D. Bruce Salley, a free lance reporter at Norfolk, was willing to make the trip.
Salley reached Manteo on May 4, and the Wright brothers’ records show that he came to their camp the next day. He told the brothers he had been asked by a New York paper to investigate the story of their flight over the ocean. The day after Salley’s visit, the Wrights did make their first flight of the season, and though Salley did not see it, he learned about it by phone from one of the men at the Kill Devil life-saving station. His informant told him that one of the Wrights had flown at least 1,000 feet, at about sixty feet above the ground.
Salley immediately sent a query from Manteo, giving briefly the gist of the story, to a list of papers he hoped would be interested. Most of the papers ignored the message; but the telegraph editor of the Cleveland (Ohio) _Leader_ not only wasn’t interested but was indignant that his intelligence should be insulted by the offer of so improbable a tale. He declined to pay the telegraph toll for the short message, even though at the night press rate of only one-third of a cent a word the cost could hardly have been more than a dime. His only reply to Salley was an admonition to “cut out the wild-cat stuff.” Salley, now equally indignant, wired back offering to give names of well-known persons who could testify to his reliability; but the Cleveland editor paid no further attention.
When Salley’s query reached the office of the New York _Herald_, it put the editors in a quandary. Though they had printed the brief report about a flight that hadn’t occurred, now they were beginning to wonder if all the reports about the Wrights weren’t fakes. Yet they knew that the owner of the paper, James Gordon Bennett, living in Paris, would almost certainly discharge any editor responsible for omitting the story if it _were_ true. They decided, with misgivings, to print the story and it appeared the next morning on the first page of the _Herald_, though not in the most prominent position.
Then the editors determined to send a staff man to Kitty Hawk for the facts. They picked for this job their star reporter, brilliant, lovable Byron R. Newton--later to become Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and afterward Collector of Customs in New York--one of the ablest newspapermen of his time. If the Wrights proved to be fakers no one could do a better job than “By” Newton at exposing them.
Other editors, too, decided that the time had come to get the “lowdown” on the Wright brothers. By the time Newton reached the little boarding place, the Tranquil House, in Manteo, he had been joined by two other correspondents: William Hosier, of the New York _American_, and P. H. McGowan, of the London _Daily Mail_. The next day two others arrived: Arthur Ruhl, writer, and James H. Hare, photographer, for _Collier’s Weekly_.
The newly arrived correspondents, noting the desolate isolation of Kitty Hawk, thought it probable enough that the Wrights must prefer to be let alone. Perhaps, they thought, if intruders came, the Wrights wouldn’t fly at all. They decided that if the Wrights were secretive, they themselves would be no less so. They would hide in the pine woods, as near as possible to the Wright camp, and observe with field glasses what happened. That meant a short walk to a wharf on Roanoke Island, five miles by sailing boat to Haman’s Bay, across the sound, and then a walk of a mile or so over the sand to the place where they should secrete themselves. They made a dicker with a boatman to take them all back and forth each day and act as their guide. Provided with food and water, field glasses, and cameras, they set out about 4 o’clock each morning from May 11 to May 14 to keep their vigil. Hour after hour they fought mosquitoes and woodticks and sometimes were drenched by rain. But to their astonishment they several times witnessed human flight.
The first flight any of them witnessed was early in the morning of May 11. “For some minutes,” wrote Newton, “the propeller blades continued to flash in the sun, and then the machine rose obliquely into the air. At first it came directly toward us, so that we could not tell how fast it was going except that it appeared to increase rapidly in size as it approached. In the excitement of this first flight, men trained to observe details under all sorts of distractions forgot their cameras, forgot their watches, forgot everything but this aerial monster chattering over our heads.”
However, “Jimmy” Hare got a good photograph of that flight.
On May 14, the correspondents saw what no person on earth had ever seen before--a flying-machine under complete control carrying _two_ men. First Wilbur made a short flight with Charles W. Furnas as passenger, and then Orville flew with Furnas for nearly three minutes.
Newton predicted in his diary just after that: “Some day Congress will erect a monument here to these Wrights.”[11]
The last flight on May 14, made by Wilbur Wright, ended in an accident. Wilbur had pulled a wrong lever. Repairs would have taken a week, and as the time the brothers could spare had elapsed, the experiments stopped. But after removing the engine and other machinery for shipment to Dayton, the Wrights left the plane in the shed at Kitty Hawk, thinking they might return. The ending of these trials brought no grief to the correspondents who had been getting up before daylight each morning, and returning to Manteo late each afternoon, footsore and tired, with their dispatches still to be written.
One night’s dispatches had brought unexpected trouble for “By” Newton. Though his report had been filed ahead of McGowan’s, in plenty of time to be relayed from his paper’s New York office to Paris and appear in the next morning’s issue of the Paris edition, a needless delay occurred in New York. In consequence, Newton, through no fault of his own, was “scooped” by McGowan the next day in the continental edition of the London _Daily Mail_. When James Gordon Bennett, proprietor of the New York _Herald_, observed that his Paris _Herald_ failed to have any account of the sensational flights at Kitty Hawk the day before, as reported in the rival _Daily Mail_, he was furious. During the two seasons when the Wrights had flown a total of 160 miles at Huffman prairie, Bennett, with scores of reporters at his disposal, had failed to learn the truth of what the Wrights had done. But now when he thought a reporter had missed a story about them, he did not wait to make inquiries but promptly sent a cable to New York ordering Newton suspended from the staff. Under Bennett’s way of conducting his papers, suspension usually was a preliminary to permanent discharge.
Though he was reinstated after he had sent to Bennett a review of the facts, along with some affidavits, Newton, all the rest of his life, felt a grievance against Bennett and the _Herald_.
Incidentally, McGowan’s “scoop” in the continental edition of the _Daily Mail_ which had so disturbed Bennett, was not accepted as truth by everyone who read it. Charles A. Bertrand, in one of the Paris papers, May 15, published this comment: “He [McGowan] depicts the flight in a manner that does honor to his imagination. If the Wrights hadn’t been seen in Europe, one would be justified in believing their very existence as uncertain as their apparatus.”
During the several days the correspondents were at Kitty Hawk, the Wrights knew they were being observed. From time to time they caught glimpses of men’s heads over the hilltop in the distance. Moreover, they heard each day, from members of a life-saving crew, just how many visitors had come. But they simply thought it was a good joke on the mysterious observers, whoever they were.
Arthur Ruhl, of _Collier’s_, had met the Wrights in Dayton about a year before. On May 14, before the final flight, he came over to the camp. But he said nothing about being a member of the group that had been observing the flights.
The Wrights invited Ruhl to stay for lunch. But he declined. He seemed to the Wrights ill at ease and anxious to get away. At a meeting with him some time afterward they learned why. He had come against the wishes of the other correspondents and was afraid he might give away the fact that they were in the near-by woods.
On May 15, the day after the crash, when it was evident that there would be no more flights, McGowan, of the _Daily Mail_, went to the camp, accompanied by still another correspondent who had just arrived, Gilson Gardner, of the Washington office of the Newspaper Enterprise Association. McGowan remarked that he had once visited Octave Chanute’s camp at Dune Park, near Chicago, in 1897 for the Chicago _Tribune_. Another visitor at the camp, a day or two before that, was a young man named J. C. Burkhardt, dressed in a brand-new outfit of hunting togs. He was a college boy who had come all the way from Ithaca just to satisfy his curiosity.
“What would you have done,” Orville Wright was asked, afterward, “if all those correspondents had come right to your camp each day and sat there to watch you?”
“We’d have had to go ahead just as if they weren’t there,” he replied. “We couldn’t have delayed our work. There was too much to do and our time was short.”
That the Wrights would have treated the correspondents politely enough was indicated in a letter from Orville Wright to Byron Newton, dated June 7, 1908. Immediately after his return to New York, Newton had written graciously to the Wrights, enclosing clippings of his dispatches to the _Herald_, and expressing his admiration for them and their achievements.
“We were aware of the presence of newspapermen in the woods,” wrote Orville in reply; “at least we had often been told that they were there. Their presence, however, did not bother us in the least, and I am only sorry that you did not come over to see us at our camp. The display of a white flag would have disposed of the rifles and shotguns with which the machine is reported to have been guarded.”
After publication of many dispatches from these eyewitnesses at Kitty Hawk and front page headlines, it might have been expected that the fact of human flight would now be generally accepted. As Newton had written to his paper, there was “no longer any ground for questioning the performance of these men and their wonderful machine.” Ruhl in _Collier’s_ had told how the correspondents had informed the world that “it was all right, the rumors true--that man could fly.” Yet even such reports by leading journalists still did not convince the general public. People began to concede that perhaps there _might_ be something in it, but many newspapers still did not publish the news. When Newton sent an article, some weeks later, on what he had seen at Kitty Hawk, to a leading magazine, it came back to him with the editor’s comment: “While your manuscript has been read with much interest, it does not seem to qualify either as fact or fiction.”
XIV
END OF DISBELIEF
The Wrights decided that Wilbur should go to France to make the demonstrations there. Orville would stay in America to build the machine for the United States Government and test it at Fort Myer, near Washington. Wilbur did not return to Dayton from Kitty Hawk but went to New York where he sailed for Europe on May 21.
Orville arrived at Fort Myer in August. Two mechanics, Taylor and Furnas, who were to assist him, had reached there a few days earlier. Army officers designated a shed on the Fort Myer grounds for use in assembling and housing the plane.
Orville’s first flight was on September 3, 1908. He went from the Cosmos Club, where he was staying, to Fort Myer by street car. It is doubtful if any of the others on that car suspected that this fellow passenger was on his way to perform a miracle. When he reached Fort Myer, Orville got the impression that not all the Army officers present thought he would succeed in meeting the tests required by the contract. The area from which the flights would be made was only about 700 by 1,000 feet. Neither of the Wrights had ever before made flights within so small a space.
Considering that this was an opportunity to see the outstanding wonder of the century, the crowd that strung about the parade ground was small. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., estimated it for his father, then President, at less than one thousand. Indeed, it was probably much less than that.
Orville circled the field one and one-half times on that first test and was in the air only one minute, eleven seconds; but the crowd “went crazy.” “When the plane first rose,” said Roosevelt, Jr., in describing the event, years afterward, “the crowd’s gasp of astonishment was not alone at the wonder of it, but because it was so unexpected. I’ll never forget the impression the sound from the crowd made on me. It was a sound of complete surprise.”
When he landed after this flight it was Orville’s turn to be astonished. Three or four supposedly “hard-boiled” newspapermen who rushed up to interview him had been so stirred by witnessing the “impossible” that each of them had tears streaming down his cheeks.
(Those who witnessed this flight might have been prepared for what they saw and less surprised, since Wilbur Wright for more than a month had been making flights in France--told about in a later chapter--and some of these were reported in the newspapers. But the brief newspaper accounts of Wilbur’s flights seldom if ever had first page display and were not treated as important news. On August 9, the day after Wilbur’s first flight, the New York _Times_ had no mention of the event, though it gave first page space to a dispatch from Canton, Ohio, about a balloon trip, and to a dispatch from Berlin about the German Kaiser contributing to a fund for building another Zeppelin airship.)
Nor did newspapers show too much excitement about this great public demonstration of practical aviation. It was not considered front page news even by Washington papers. The New York _World_ account was on page five and most of the report was not about the wonder of the flying-machine, but about the behavior of the crowd, described as in fear of being hit by what the _World_ called “the vessel.”
Many thousands were present on the second day of the tests when Orville flew about three miles in four minutes, fifteen seconds. After one of these flights, a reporter, it was said, got in touch with Professor Simon Newcomb who, a few years before, had so irrefutably explained why flying was impossible. The reporter wanted to know if Professor Newcomb thought passenger planes would be the next step.
“No,” Newcomb was reported to have replied, “because no plane could ever carry the weight of anyone besides the pilot.” It might have been expected that by this time Professor Newcomb would have become more cautious!
Orville made a short flight on September 7, and two flights the next day; one of eleven minutes, ten seconds; the other of seven minutes, thirty-four seconds. On the morning of September 9, he circled the field fifty-seven times in fifty-seven minutes, twenty-five seconds. Later in the day, he circled the field fifty-five times in one hour, two and one-quarter minutes. Then he surprised and delighted his friend, Lieutenant Frank P. Lahm, by inviting him to go with him for a flight. They were in the air six minutes, twenty-four seconds, and circled the field six and one-half times. All three of these flights on the ninth established new world endurance records; two of them for flights with pilot alone, and the third for pilot with passenger. Orville made a flight of one hour, five minutes, fifty-two seconds on September 10, rising to a height of 200 feet and exceeding the world endurance record made by himself the day before. On the next day he again broke the one-man endurance record by flying for one hour, ten minutes, and twenty-four seconds, while circling the field fifty-seven times and describing two figure eights. On the twelfth, he increased the two-man endurance record by taking with him Major George O. Squier, Acting Chief Signal Officer, for a flight of nine minutes, six seconds. Immediately after that, Orville made a flight alone. He circled the field seventy-one times in one hour and fifteen minutes--again breaking the endurance record for one-man flight. It was estimated that he reached a height of 300 feet.