It was not newspaper reporters, he said, but the world’s curiosity that had ridden, climbed, waded, and tramped all those miles and now lay hiding there, hungry and peering across the intervening sands. “There was something weird, almost uncanny about the whole thing,” wrote another correspondent. “Here on this lonely beach was being performed the greatest act of the ages, but there were no spectators and no applause save the booming of the surf and the startled cries of the sea birds.”
Wilbur and Orville wondered why the reporters remained at such a distance. Only later were they told that it had been said the brothers kept rifles and shotguns at the ready to guard their machine. Asked what he and Wilbur would have done had the correspondents come into camp and sat there to watch, Orville replied, “We couldn’t have delayed our work. There was too much to do and our time was short.”
Describing what the scene looked like from where they were posted, another of the correspondents wrote of “dazzling white sand dunes, almost monumental, to the right, and to the left in the distance more sand dunes, and a glimpse of the sea, and the Carolina sun, pouring down out of a clear blue sky, immersed everything in a shimmer and glare.” The two brothers, moving their machine about near the shed, looked like “two black dots.” The engine, when it started up, sounded like that of “a reaper working a distant field.” The propellers “flashed and whirled,” and the next thing the plane swept by “fast as an express train.”
“[We were] all seasoned campaigners in the field of unexpected events,” wrote the Paris Herald correspondent, Byron Newton, “but for all that, this spectacle of men flying was so startling, so bewildering to the senses in that year 1908, that we all stood like so many marble men.”
A photographer for Collier’s Weekly, James Hare, snapped what would be the first photograph ever published of a Wright Flyer in the air.
Early the morning of May 14 the onlookers were treated to a sight never before seen anywhere—two men in a motor-powered flying machine—when Wilbur took Charlie Furnas up for a short ride.
To the newsmen from their distant vantage point, it appeared Wilbur and Orville had taken flight together and so some of their dispatches reported. But the brothers, ever conscious of the risks involved, had already decided they must never fly together. That way, if one were to be killed, the other could still carry on with the work.
Days as hot as summer had returned to the Outer Banks, and that afternoon, when Wilbur went up alone, the heat was nearly unbearable. Flying at something over 50 miles per hour, he made one big circle and was starting into another when, still unfamiliar with the new control levers, he made a mistake with the rudder and suddenly plunged to the ground about a mile from camp.
“I was watching with the field glass,” Orville would recount. “The machine turned on end—the front end—with the tail in the air. There was a big splash of sand—such a cloud that I couldn’t see from where I was exactly what had happened. . . . It was probably thirty seconds before Will appeared.”
He had been violently thrown against the underside of the top wing and had to be pulled from the wreckage. There was a cut across his nose, and though hit hard and bruised on both shoulders, an arm, and one hand, he was not seriously injured. No bones were broken.
The plane, however, was a total wreck, and thus as Wilbur announced, the tests had come to an end. Two days later he was on his way again. It was agreed he would go to France to proceed with the required demonstrations there, and that Orville would do the same in Washington.
During little more than a week of test flights at Kill Devil Hills, he and Orville had been the subjects of far more attention and praise in the press than they had ever known. They had become a popular sensation. Still no major public performance had yet been made. The rabbit had still to be pulled from the hat for all to see.
Passage was arranged for him on the Touraine, Wilbur reported to Katharine from New York. “I hate like anything to go away without first coming home.”
“Write often,” she told him in response. “Don’t come home without getting me several pairs of gloves—number six—black and white, short and long. . . . Don’t get them unless they are cheap.”
II.
The voyage to Le Havre proved uneventful—“smooth but foggy much of the time” was about all Wilbur had to say of the crossing. He reached Paris on May 29, and for the next week he and Hart Berg were on the move, touring possible sites for the public demonstrations, including Fontainebleau and Vitry, but found nothing suitable.