He had promised he would say nothing of what he had seen at Huffman Prairie in anything he wrote in his Gleanings in Bee Culture, and good as his word, he described only his venture by automobile.
“In a recent trip of 400 miles through Ohio,” he wrote, “I passed through Ashland, Mansfield, Marion, Delaware, Marysville, Springfield, Dayton . . . so many different towns in a brief period of time that I can hardly remember now which was which.” He told how he tried and succeeded in not killing any of the numerous chickens on the road, or scaring any of the horses. He wrote of having to give the engine fresh water every ten or fifteen miles, and how wherever he stopped, for water or gasoline, a crowd gathered. He described the torn-up streets and mud roads en route, but then could not resist adding:
And, by the way, we are already, at least to some extent, ignoring not only mud roads, but roads of every kind, and climbing through the air, and I do not mean by means of the gas-balloon either. But I am not at liberty just now to tell all I know in regard to this matter.
In the second week of September came word from the Wrights that he should return without delay. He reached Dayton on Tuesday, September 20, 1904, the day Wilbur would attempt something never done before in the history of the world. He would fly a power machine in a complete circle.
Still recovering from his crash in August, Orville would be on the sidelines watching with Root and Charlie Taylor. Apparently no one else was on hand at Huffman Prairie.
“God in his great mercy has permitted me to be, at least somewhat instrumental in ushering in and introducing to the great wide world an invention that may outrank electric cars, the automobiles . . . and . . . may fairly take a place beside the telephone and wireless telegraphy,” Root would begin his eyewitness account.
But before describing what he saw happen, he made a point of stressing that the Wrights were not just the sort who love machinery, but were “interested in the modern developments of science and art.” He had been “astonished” by the extent of their library and to find in conversation that “they were thoroughly versed not only in regard to our present knowledge, but everything that had been done in the past.” In saying this in what he wrote, he would be the first to recognize how much more there was to Wilbur and Orville than most imagined, even among the relative few who took time to give it some thought.
They were not simply “another Darius Green,” Root stressed, but “scientific explorers” serving the world much as Columbus had.
He described in his account of September 20 how Wilbur took his place lying flat to offer less wind resistance, how the engine was warmed up to speed, and, how, with everything ready, “a sort of trap” (the catapult) was sprung, and suddenly the machine was aloft.
The plane flew low, never rising more than 20 to 25 feet above the ground. “I was surprised at the speed and I was astonished at the wonderful lifting power.” Then it had turned and headed straight back toward him, and with feelings very like those expressed by John T. Daniels after seeing the first flight at Kitty Hawk, he wrote:
When it first turned that circle, and came near the starting point, I was right in front of it, and I said then, and I believe still, it was one of the grandest sights, if not the grandest sight, of my life.
The plane was still flying low, and Orville, who was standing close by Root, urged him to get to one side, for fear it might suddenly come down.
To Root the landing of the plane was hardly less amazing:
When the engine is shut off, the apparatus glides to the ground very quietly and alights on something much like a pair of light sled-runners [skids], sliding over the grassy surface perhaps a rod or more. Whenever it is necessary to slow up the speed before alighting, you turn the nose uphill. It will then climb right up on the air until the momentum is exhausted, when, by skillful management, it can be dropped as lightly as a feather.
The “skillful management” was breathtaking. It was not just that the machine was like no other on the face of the earth, he wrote, but there was probably no one “beyond these two who learned the trick of controlling it.”
When Columbus discovered America, he did not know what the outcome would be, Root would conclude his account. Not even “the wildest enthusiast” could have foreseen. “In a like manner these two brothers have probably not even a faint glimpse of what their discovery is going to bring to the children of men.”
As for Huffman Prairie, it was henceforth historic ground. Here man and his machine had “?‘learned to fly,’ very much like a young bird out of its nest learns by practice to use its wings.”