The day in Dayton had been cloudy and freezing cold with snow on the ground. It was past dark when Carrie Kayler, preparing supper in the kitchen at 7 Hawthorn Street, stopped to answer the doorbell. The Western Union man handed her a telegram, which she signed for and carried upstairs to the Bishop.
A few minutes later he came down looking pleased, but with no excitement in his voice, told her, “Well, they’ve made a flight.”
The telegram read:
SUCCESS FOUR FLIGHTS THURSDAY MORNING ALL AGAINST TWENTY ONE MILE WIND STARTED FROM LEVEL WITH ENGINE POWER ALONE AVERAGE SPEED THROUGH AIR THIRTY ONE MILES LONGEST 57 SECONDS INFORM PRESS HOME FOR CHRISTMAS.
OREVELLE WRIGHT
(Mistakes in the transmission had caused 59 seconds to become 57 and Orville’s name to be misspelled.)
Katharine came in from school, looked at the telegram, and told Carrie to delay supper while she went to tell Lorin.
Success it most certainly was. And more. What had transpired that day in 1903, in the stiff winds and cold of the Outer Banks in less than two hours time, was one of the turning points in history, the beginning of change for the world far greater than any of those present could possibly have imagined. With their homemade machine, Wilbur and Orville Wright had shown without a doubt that man could fly and if the world did not yet know it, they did.
Their flights that morning were the first ever in which a piloted machine took off under its own power into the air in full flight, sailed forward with no loss of speed, and landed at a point as high as that from which it started.
Being the kind of men they were, neither ever said the stunning contrast between their success and Samuel Langley’s full-scale failure just days before made what they had done on their own all the more remarkable. Not incidentally, the Langley project had cost nearly $70,000, the greater part of it public money, whereas the brothers’ total expenses for everything from 1900 to 1903, including materials and travel to and from Kitty Hawk, came to a little less than $1,000, a sum paid entirely from the modest profits of their bicycle business.
Of those who had been eyewitnesses at Kill Devil Hills the morning of the 17th, John T. Daniels was much the most effusive about what he had felt. “I like to think about it now,” he would say in an interview years later. “I like to think about that first airplane the way it sailed off in the air . . . as pretty as any bird you ever laid your eyes on. I don’t think I ever saw a prettier sight in my life.”
But it would never have happened, Daniels also stressed, had it not been for the two “workingest boys” he ever knew.
It wasn’t luck that made them fly; it was hard work and common sense; they put their whole heart and soul and all their energy into an idea and they had the faith.
As they crated up the damaged Flyer to ship home, the brothers were “absolutely sure” in their own minds that they had mastered the problem of mechanical flying. But they also understood as no one else could have how much they had still to do, how many improvements were needed, how much more they themselves needed to learn about flying so different a machine, and that this would come only with a great deal more experience.
The Flyer would go into storage in Dayton. It would never be flown again.
CHAPTER SIX
Out at Huffman Prairie
I found them in a pasture lot. . . . The few people who occasionally got a glimpse of the experiments evidently considered it only another Darius Green, but I recognized at once they were really scientific explorers who were serving the world in much the same way that Columbus had when he discovered America.
AMOS I. ROOT
I.
It had been agreed earlier at home that were Wilbur and Orville to succeed at Kitty Hawk, Lorin, acting as press agent, would immediately notify the local papers and the Associated Press. So once Katharine had delivered their “SUCCESS” telegram to him, Lorin took it downtown to the city editor at the Dayton Daily Journal, Frank Tunison, who also represented the Associated Press.
Tunison read the telegram and showed no interest. “Fifty-seven seconds, hey?” he said. “If it had been fifty-seven minutes, then it might have been a news item.”