The crowd on hand was small. Washington had yet to catch on to what was happening at Fort Myer. At last, at about six o’clock, Orville climbed into his seat, the motor was started, and the big propellers were “cutting the air at a frightful rate,” when he called out, “Let her go!”
The weights of the catapult dropped, the plane shot down the rail, but then for 50 feet or more it skimmed barely above the grass before lifting into the air. Everyone was shouting.
At the lower end of the drill field, Orville banked, turned, and started back, the white canvas of the double wings standing out sharply against the dark border of trees at the edge of Arlington Cemetery.
The crowd broke into a “frenzy of enthusiasm” as the plane circled overhead at about 35 feet and headed away down the field again. Suddenly it veered off toward the wooden hangar, descended at an abrupt angle and hit the ground.
The crowd rushed forward to find Orville calmly brushing the dust from his clothes. “It shows I need a great deal of practice,” he said.
By his estimate he had flown somewhat less than a mile at a speed of about 40 miles per hour. According to their contract with the army, the brothers were to receive $25,000 if the Flyer achieved 40 miles per hour in its speed test.
The day after, Friday, September 4, Orville and the Flyer remained in the air more than four minutes, circling the parade ground five and a half times under perfect control, covering three miles with no mishap. Major George Squier, president of the board in charge of the tests, thought the flight “splendid.” The Flyer “seemed to respond perfectly to your every touch, and that landing was a marvel,” he told Orville. Other officers were calling it the most wonderful exhibition they had ever seen.
In the days that followed, Orville provided one sensational performance after another, breaking one world record after another. As never before the two “bicycle mechanics” and their flying machines were causing simultaneous sensations on both sides of the Atlantic. They had become a transcontinental two-ring circus. Only now it was the younger, lesser known of the two whose turn had come to steal the show.
Early the morning of Wednesday, September 9, with relatively few spectators present, Orville circled the Fort Myer parade ground 57 times, remaining in the air not quite an hour. When word reached Washington that he might fly again that afternoon, offices were closed and a thousand or more government officials—members of the cabinet, department heads, embassy personnel, members of Congress—came pouring across the Potomac by automobile and trolley to see for themselves.
“At 5:15, as the sun was disappearing below the Virginia horizon,” wrote the Dayton Journal correspondent on the scene, “the latest invention of man to change the laws of nature, rose grandly into space and sailed over the drill grounds.
Higher and higher it rose, turned at a slight angle as the aviator brought it round the far side of the field, and raced along at increasing speed. . . . Round after round the machine traveled on cutting short turns, shooting along the stretch and presented somewhat the appearance of an automobile racing about an imaginary course in the air.
He had flown around the circle 55 times and was in the air altogether an hour and three minutes, another new world record. At home in Dayton the Herald called it “the most marvelous feat in aviation yet recorded.”
The next day, September 10, against a stiff wind, Orville stayed in the air longer still by several minutes.
Worried that Orville might be losing count of the number of times he had circled the field, Charlie Taylor climbed on top of the Flyer’s shed with a pot of white paint and a brush and began marking off the times on the tar paper roof in figures big enough for Orville to see. As the numbers 50 and 55 appeared, the excitement of the crowd became “acute.” Charlie began signaling with his arms. Not until after dusk, upon completing 571/2 circles, did Orville start back down to earth.
Swooping in for a landing, the plane headed straight in the direction of the crowd, but then, sending up a cloud of dust as its skids hit the ground, came to a stop not more than 20 feet short of the crowd.
One of those watching that day was the noted sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who was later to carve the faces on Mount Rushmore. When he first saw Orville’s plane sitting on the ground, he had not been particularly impressed. It looked to him like something any boy might build, not at all how he had imagined a flying machine. But then Orville had taken off. “He could fly as he wished, move as he willed.
[He] rode the air as deliberately as if he were passing over a solid macadam road. Nothing I have ever seen is comparable. . . . There is no action of the wings, so you do not think of birds. It has life, power.
And yet it was so simple, Borglum wrote, that one wondered why in the world human beings had not built one long before.