The Bishop's Boys (42 page)

Kill Devil Hills, N.C., 10:35
A.M.
, December 17, 1903. Surfman John T. Daniels, pressed into service as a photographer, caught the machine just as it left the rail, with Wilbur in mid-stride. The result is perhaps the most reproduced photograph of all time.

At about 10:35, Orv shifted the lever to the left. Slowly, much more slowly than on December 14, the machine began to move down the rail into the teeth of a wind that was now gusting up to 27 miles per hour. Wilbur had no trouble keeping up with the craft, which rose from the track after only a forty-foot run. Daniels snapped the photo catching Will in mid-stride, apparently a bit startled by what was happening. He is the center of attention, the object to which the eye is drawn. That is as it should be.

The lifesavers broke into a ragged cheer. Bob Westcott, still watching through his telescope, let out a whoop of his own. The griddle cakes he was preparing for lunch that day were burned.

It was over very quickly. The airplane floundered forward, rising and falling for 12 seconds until it struck the sand only 120 feet from the point at which it had left the rail. You could have thrown a ball farther but, for the Wrights, it was enough. For the first time in history, an airplane had taken off, moved forward under its own power, and landed at a point at least as high as that from which it had started—all under the complete control of the pilot. On this isolated, windswept beach, a man had flown.

The 1903 airplane, its elevator support broken in a hard landing following the fourth and final flight of December 17, 1903—852 feet in 59 seconds.

The small group ran forward to congratulate Orv. Then it was back to work, carrying the machine to the starting point for another trial. But first the Wrights invited everyone inside for a bit of warmth. When they reemerged at 11:20, Will took his place for a flight of 195 feet. Twenty minutes later, Orv was back in the cradle, covering 200 feet in 15 seconds. At about noon, Will tried again, with spectacular success: he flew 852 feet in 59 seconds, demonstrating beyond any doubt that the machine was capable of sustained flight.

The distance for the men carrying the machine back to the starting point was longer this time. When it was done, they paused for a moment to catch their breath. The brothers, confident now, discussed the possibility of a really long flight—perhaps all the way down the beach to the telegraph at the Kitty Hawk weather station.

Suddenly, a gust of wind raised one wingtip high into the air. Daniels, who was standing closest, jumped to catch a strut and was carried along. The engine broke loose as the disintegrating machine rolled over backward to the accompaniment of Daniels’s screams and the sound of snapping wires and splintering wood. When the dust settled, the world’s first airplane lay transformed into a twisted mass of wreckage. Daniels, at least, was uninjured. For the rest of his life, he would remind anyone willing to listen that he had survived the first airplane crash.

The Wrights and their volunteer crew dragged what was left back into the hangar. The earlier aircraft, the gliders of 1900–02, had simply been abandoned at the site. This time they would ship the remains home to Dayton.

Having done all they could, the lifesavers walked back to their station. Johnny Moore, determined to be the first to break the news, sprinted down the beach toward Kitty Hawk. Encountering Bill Tate, he called out: “They done it! They done it! Damn’d if they ain’t flew!”
²⁴

The Wrights ate a quiet, unhurried lunch, then strolled to Kitty Hawk themselves. They called on friends to confirm the reports of their success, but not before sending a telegram to the bishop. There was only one telegraph in Kitty Hawk, the Weather Bureau instrument that Joe Dosher used to communicate with the main office in Norfolk each day. Dosher, who had been the Wrights’ first friend and contact on the Outer Banks, was on duty that afternoon. He agreed to send the message on to Bureau headquarters in Norfolk, where it would be passed to the Western Union operator for transmission to Dayton.

Just as the Wrights were leaving the Weather Bureau shack to walk on into the village, Dosher called them back. The Norfolk operator, Jim Gray, had sent a return message, asking if he could share the news with a reporter at the Norfolk
Virginian-Pilot
. The answer was an emphatic no.
²⁵

The Wrights had already arranged for the release of their story. Orv had given instructions to the family back in November—“If we should succeed in making a flight, and telegraph, we will expect Lorin as our press agent (!) to notify the papers and the Associated Press.” By early December, Milton was busy “getting typewriter copies of the description of the Wright flyer, and copies of a sketch of the inventors” ready for distribution to newsmen.
²⁶

Carrie was working in the kitchen at 7 Hawthorn when the telegram arrived at half past five on the evening of December 17. She immediately took it upstairs to Milton. At some point during the roundabout transmission process Orville’s name had been misspelled, but the basic message was clear. They had done it.

Milton was all smiles when Katharine arrived home from school a few minutes later. Carrie agreed to hold supper while she walked the telegram and a copy of the bishop’s press release over to Lorin’s house. Along the way she stopped to telegraph the news to Chanute. The message was delivered to his home just after eight o’clock that evening.
²⁸
His response was immediate—and typical:

Lorin went downtown to the offices of the Dayton
Journal
after supper and was directed to the desk of Frank Tunison, local representative of the Associated Press. Tunison was uninterested. His comment to Lorin became legend in newspaper circles: “Fifty-seven seconds, hey? If it had been fifty-seven minutes then it might have been a news item.” Seven decades later, Lorin’s daughter Ivonette could “still remember the depressed expression on my father’s face when he returned.”
³⁰

Had it been up to Tunison, the story might never have gotten out. Back in Norfolk, however, Ed Dean proved more enterprising. Dean was a friend of Jim Gray, the Norfolk operator Joe Dosher had asked to relay the Wrights’ message on to Western Union. Gray told Dean about the telegram despite his instructions. Dean in turn approached his city editor, Keville Glennan, who agreed that the story was too good to pass up. The two men spent the next few hours fleshing out the sparse and enigmatic details of the telegram. Harry Moore, who worked in the
Virginian-Pilot
circulation department, also took a hand in composing the news account.

The finished story shows how heavily the three men drew on their imagination to fill in the gaps. The problems began with the headline that flashed across the front page of the paper on the morning of December 18:

They added a six-bladed “underwheel” that pushed the machine up into the air; a second propeller moved it forward through the sky. The engine was suspended beneath the “navigator’s car,” which also featured a “huge fan-shaped rudder of canvas” that could be moved up or down and from side to side for control. Then there was the distance flown—three miles at an altitude of 60 feet. Fortunately, one of the onlookers had preserved a record of Wilbur’s first words after the conclusion of the flight.” ‘Eureka,’ he cried, as did the alchemist of old.”

When the Associated Press declined Glennan’s offer to put the story on the wire, the editor sent queries to twenty-one newspapers asking if they would be interested in copying the piece. Five newspapers responded. Two of them, the
New York American
and the Cincinnati
Enquirer
, carried it in their morning editions. Perhaps inspired by the account in the morning
Enquirer
, the afternoon papers in Dayton took note of the flights for the first time. The Dayton
Herald
simply abbreviated the Norfolk piece. The
Daily News
was a bit more imaginative, if no more accurate. The story, carried in a section generally reserved for neighborhood news, was headlined: “
DAYTON BOYS EMULATE GREAT SANTOS-DUMONT
.”
³¹

It was an early indication of how friends and neighbors would react to the fact that two “local boys” had accomplished something beyond the wildest dreams of the world-famous Alberto Santos-Dumont.

The Associated Press, having rejected Glennan’s story the evening before, now offered a 400-word abbreviated version to subscribers. Fantastic yarns began to appear on the back pages of newspapers across the nation. Wilbur and Orville, returning home from Kitty Hawk, found it difficult to understand how their careful plans for a low-key announcement to the press could have gone so wrong. Passing through the Chesapeake and Ohio depot in Huntington, West Virginia, early on the morning of December 23, they sent one last wire to Katharine: “Have survived perilous trip reported in papers. Home tonight.”
³²

T
he family greeted its two heroes with quiet pride and little fanfare. Carrie, aware that Mr. Will and Mr. Orv had not had a decent meal in weeks, served porterhouse steaks and a fancy dessert on their first evening home, assuring them “there was more of everything in the kitchen.” She was not prepared for Orville’s unquenchable thirst for milk, however. He drank glass after glass, until Carrie began watering it down in the kitchen, certain that he would not notice. He did, and told Carrie he was “grieved” she would try to cheat him by dairying the milk. The story of the “dairied milk” remained a joke between them for the rest of their lives.
¹

Christmas was especially festive that year. There was a dinner at Lorin’s, with presents for everyone. Wilbur and Orville presented a set of silver forks and pearl-handled steak knives to Katharine, and a two-inch micrometer to Charlie Taylor.

They expected Charlie to put his gift to immediate use. The 1903 engine had been destroyed in the accident on December 17. “They wanted a new one built right away,” Charlie recalled. “They were always thinking of the next thing to do; they didn’t waste much time worrying about the past.”
²

Indeed, it was a time for decisions. “After several seasons,” Wilbur explained to an acquaintance,

Flight was no longer an obsessive hobby. They would turn the day-to-day operation of the bicycle shop over to Charlie and concentrate on the flying-machine business. The flights of December 17 were not the end of the quest, they lay somewhere in the middle. Frank Tunison’s comment was close to the mark: fifty-nine seconds in the air would not impress a skeptical world. If they were to enjoy a financial reward for all their work, they would have to produce a genuinely practical airplane.

Work was under way on a new flying machine and engine by January 1, 1904. At the same time, the Wrights took steps to correct the ridiculous press reports arising from the
Virginian-Pilot
story. On January 5 they offered another release to the Associated Press, outlining precisely what had occurred on December 17. Newspapers across the nation and in Europe picked up the story. In addition, the account was sent to flying-machine enthusiasts in France and England, and the brothers asked Chanute to broadcast the news through his network of friends and correspondents.

Reactions varied. Predictably, the level of interest was highest in France. Ferber wrote to Chanute on January 27, thanking him “heartily” for the news. The letter reflects Ferber’s extraordinary overconfidence, and indicates how little even the best-informed French enthusiasts knew about the problems that the Wrights had faced and overcome: