Brother Orville was much on Wilbur’s mind, for by then Orville had gone to Washington to begin preparing for the flights he was to make at Fort Myer, Virginia. Earlier, in midsummer, as Wilbur had been about to proceed with his demonstrations for the French, he had received a letter from his father urging him to “avoid all unnecessary personal risk.” Now Wilbur sent off much the same kind of warning to Orville, as older brother but also as one who had now experienced a number of turns onstage before enormous crowds and an ever-eager, ever-demanding press.
I tell them plainly that I intend for the present to experiment only under the most favorable conditions. . . . I advise you most earnestly to stick to calms, till after you are sure of yourself. Don’t go out even for all the officers of the government unless you would go equally if they were absent. Do not let yourself be forced into doing anything before you are ready. Be very cautious and proceed slowly in attempting flights in the middle of the day when wind gusts are frequent. . . . Do not let people talk to you all day and all night. It will wear you out, before you are ready for real business. Courtesy has limits. If necessary appoint some hour in the daytime and refuse absolutely to receive visitors even for a minute at other times. Do not receive anyone after 8 o’clock at night.
Then, after some technical discussion about the rudder, he wrote again. “I can only say be extraordinarily cautious.”
On the evening of August 25 in Le Mans, a celebration banquet in Wilbur’s honor took place at the H?tel du Dauphin. This time he was happy to join in the festivities.
Part III
CHAPTER NINE
The Crash
[He] rode the air as deliberately as if he were passing over a solid macadam road. Nothing I have ever seen is comparable.
GUTZON BORGLUM
I.
With her young nephew Milton much improved in health and her classes at the high school soon to resume, Katharine was feeling more herself. Orville was in Washington preparing for the demonstrations at Fort Myer, staying at the elegant Cosmos Club and meeting “stacks of prominent people.” And hardly a day passed without something in the papers about the continuing clamor over Wilbur in France.
Both brothers wrote when they had time, but Katharine longed for more than just aviation talk. “Suppose you tell me about a few things when you write!” she admonished Wilbur in one letter. “What do I care about the position of the trees on the practice ground? Hey! Hey! Sterchens wants to hear all about the beautiful young ladies and the flowers and champagne!”
Wilbur would go only so far as to tell her Mrs. Berg was a “very smart” and “charming woman, like yourself.”
Orville said he could hardly get any work done, so much time was taken up “answering the ten thousand fool questions people ask me about the machine.” A Washington Post reporter noted with amazement how “Mr. Wright stood and talked and talked and talked to his questioners.” Still, with it all, Orville was frank to tell Katharine, “I am meeting some very handsome young ladies!” The trouble was if he were to meet them again, he would have a hard time remembering their names.
“I don’t know when Pop has been in such good health,” she was happy to report to Wilbur. “Now, if you and Orville don’t do some wild things to get me crazy, I think I’ll weather the thing through.”
Fort Myer occupied a stretch of high ground on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, just west of Arlington National Cemetery. With its neatly arranged, handsome red-brick buildings, it looked not unlike an attractive college campus, and offered a panoramic view of Washington five miles in the distance. At the center was the parade ground, measuring approximately 1,000 feet by 700 feet, and there Orville was to perform his test flights.
It was a space smaller even than what Wilbur had to work with at Les Hunaudières, but with it came an ample shed for a hangar and a dozen army men ready to assist. To get there from the city he traveled back and forth by streetcar.
After several days of trouble with the motor, and with help from Charlie Taylor and Charlie Furnas, both of whom had come from Dayton, he had all in order as scheduled. It would be the first full-scale public performance of a Wright plane in the United States, and the machine Orville was to take into the air had never been flown until now.
Not until late in the afternoon of September 3 was it wheeled into place. That Orville was extremely on edge was plainly evident. “For the first time since his arrival in this city,” wrote a reporter for the New York Times, “Mr. Wright betrayed obvious signs of nervousness. The lines on his face seemed deeper than ever, and there was a furtiveness and an uneasiness of manner which was noticeable to everyone. He seemed to be making a tremendous effort to control himself.”
He could hardly hold still. One minute he would be up on a sawhorse examining the upper wing, the next, down on his hands and knees helping adjust the starting mechanism. “That man’s nerves are pretty near the jumping off place,” another correspondent was heard to say.