Not one reporter bothered to attend during this time. Nor did public interest increase. With few exceptions there seemed no public interest at all, no local excitement or curiosity or sense of wonder over the miraculous thing happening right in Dayton’s own backyard.
Nor did anyone seem to appreciate the kind of minds, not to say the extraordinary skill and courage, needed to succeed at so daring a venture. In five months the brothers were to make no less than fifty test flights at Huffman Prairie, and Charlie Taylor, ever on hand in case of motor trouble, would say that every time he watched either of them head down the starting track, he had the awful feeling he might never again see him alive. To Wilbur and Orville, it seemed fear was a stranger.
Writing his autobiography later, James Cox, publisher of the Dayton Daily News, remembered reports coming “to our office that the airship had been in the air over the Huffman Prairie . . . but our news staff would not believe the stories. Nor did they ever take the pains to go out to see.” Nor did Cox.
When the city editor of the Daily News, Dan Kumler, was asked later why for so long nothing was reported of the momentous accomplishments taking place so nearby, he said after a moment’s reflection, “I guess the truth is that we were just plain dumb.”
II.
That same September, 200 miles to the northeast in Ohio, a small, elderly gentleman set off in his automobile, as he had before earlier in the summer, for Huffman Prairie on invitation from the Wrights to come see the progress they were making.
He was Amos Ives Root of Medina, a town just south of Cleveland. Always neatly dressed, his short white beard trimmed, he stood no more than five feet three. But his energy and curiosity were great indeed. His bright hazel eyes seemed to miss nothing.
Born in a log cabin, he had started his own business, manufacturing and marketing beekeeping supplies, in 1869, at age thirty, and soon became widely known as “the bee man” of Ohio. At sixty-four, he was extremely well-off, happily married, a father of five, proud grandfather, and quite free to pursue a whole range of active interests. As would be said in the Medina County newspaper, Amos Root bubbled with enthusiasm and a constant desire to “see the wheels go round.” He loved clocks, windmills, bicycles, machines of all kinds, and especially his Oldsmobile Runabout. Seldom was he happier than when out on the road in it and in all seasons.
While I like horses in a certain way [he wrote], I do not enjoy caring for them. I do not like the smell of the stables. I do not like to be obliged to clean a horse every morning, and I do not like to hitch one up in winter. . . . It takes time to hitch up a horse; but the auto is ready to start off in an instant. It is never tired; it gets there quicker than any horse can possibly do.
As for the Oldsmobile, he liked to say, at $350 it cost less than a horse and carriage.
He was also deeply religious, a Sunday School teacher, an active supporter of the temperance movement, and enjoyed conveying his thoughts and ideas on these and a host of other topics in the column he wrote for the Root company’s beekeepers trade journal, Gleanings in Bee Culture.
It was to be he of all people, the Ohio bee man, who would recognize as no one yet had the genius of the Wrights and the full importance of their flying machine. He would describe in detail what he saw happen at Huffman Prairie, and further, he would describe it accurately. It was not the Dayton papers that finally broke the story—or the Chicago Tribune or the New York Times or Scientific American—but Amos Root’s own Gleanings in Bee Culture.
He had begun correspondence with the Wrights in February. “I hope you will excuse me, friends, for the liberty I take in addressing you. Let me say briefly that I have all my life had an idea in my head that a flying machine should be made on the principle of flying a kite.” He wanted very much, he continued, to be on hand for their experiments and promised never to “undertake to borrow any of your ideas.”
In response the brothers had said they would let him know when their new machine was ready for trial. Through spring and into summer, waiting for word to come, Root kept writing. “Please excuse me, friends, but I am so anxious to see that airship I can hardly sleep nights.”
When in mid-August word finally came, he was off at once for Dayton in his Runabout, a journey of no little uncertainty then given the state of the roads. He had arrived at the time when the Wrights’ machine was not performing well—certainly not as they wished—but for Root the spectacle of actual flight was “one of the bright spots in my life,” as he told them in gratitude.